With the release of the COLOURlovers API, you can now access almost 1 million named colors and more than 325,000 color palettes for your creative projects and applications. Creating a theme editor and want to give your users some color theme options? Creating a visual project that ties keywords to colors? Who knows what amazingly creative stuff people will come up with.

Below are two showcase examples of the COLOURlovers API in action as well as the full API documentation. Happy API COLOURloving!

COLOURlovers API Usage Showcase

Desktop Color Search - AIR App

Desktop Color Search is an Adobe AIR app that runs on your desktop and allows you to search the entire COLOURlovers database for colors, palettes and patterns. You’ll need to download the Adobe AIR runtime in order to run Desktop Color Search, you can use the link below to install AIR. (It works in both Windows and on Mac OS X)
Special thanks to Levi McCallum at FutonMedia for coding the AIR app.

Download Desktop Color Finder  |  Download Adobe AIR

DEKAF LOVERS

A simple interface to COLOURlover’s deep, deep palette library, it creates randomized compositions using rectangular geometry drawn by the Degrafa drawing library.
Have some fun of your own color fun with Dekaf Lovers.
 



 

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In order to support our growth and the costs of maintaining and developing new features for our color loving community, we’ve added some great extended features and are offering them as a thank you to those who support us with a small yearly sponsorship of only $20. Thank you for helping us grow our wonderful community.

To become a sponsor or to give the gift of color love, visit: www.colourlovers.com/lovers/sponsors

Benefits of Being a Sponsored COLOURlover:

- Have Your Love Notes and Subscription Updates Emailed to You
- Download All Your Colors and Palettes in One File
- See More Recent Activity on Your Profile, Colors, Palettes & Patterns
- Customize Your Profile to Show Top, New or Fave Colors, Patterns or Patterns
- See Custom Palette Widths by Default When Browsing
- Choose Your Top Groups and Lovers to Display on Your Profile
- Get Beta Access to New Tools Before They Are Launched Publicly
- Fancy Avatar and Profile Badges to Show Your Sponsorship
- Help Us Continue to Develop a Supportive, Fun and Creative Community
- More to Come Soon!

Have Your Love Notes and Subscription Updates Emailed to You

See More Recent Activity on Your Profile, Colors, Palettes & Patterns

Show Top, New or Fave Colors, Patterns or Patterns on Your Profile

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Colors, like people, tend to mix and mingle according to their inclinations. Sometimes two complementary HEXes will combine to create a new color. Sometimes two similar HEXes will merge to illuminate a more brilliant hue. Is it preposterous to label such unions as “straight” and “gay”? The ColourLovers library is full of colors with orientations identified in their titles. At a glance, can you tell a “straight” color from a “gay” one? Here’s a three-part quiz, each more challenging than the last. In this first quiz, one column features colors with exclusively gay names. The other column features colors with exclusively straight names. Which is which? For the answer, click on any color to reveal the name.

A	B

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Think you can’t find beauty in a bank? Think again. The Dexia Tower, located in Brussels, embodies just that. Thanks to the creativity of LAb[au], a Belgium based digital design lab, the Dexia Tower has become infinitely more than just a home for paperwork and numbers.

The tower itself went up in 2006, and since then has been host to a variety of fantastic light shows. The third tallest building in Brussels has a lot more going for it than just height, however: Of the building’s 6000 windows, 4200 of them contain an installation of 12 light bulbs, each housing 3 LED’s (a green, blue and red) that can be combined to form a complete palette of color. The result is a tremendous canvas that can display anything from letters to geometric designs. Seem wasteful? It isn’t –recent tests show that the tower uses 1/3 of the electricity that Paris’ famed Eiffel Tower uses, thanks to a highly efficient energy saving LED lighting system.

by Pierre J.

The tower is currently exhibiting a show called “Who’s afraid of Red, Green and Blue?” which is shown in the picture above. In a two month collaboration with the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium, the tower exhibits the temperature of the following day using color. The color code follows a naturally coordinating scale, with violet symbolizing -6° or colder and warming through the color spectrum, red being at the opposite end and symbolizing +6° or warmer. The result is beauty with something useful below the surface, and while there is much to be said for beauty and art all on their own, the function of the Dexia Tower’s current show lends a lovely depth to the spectacle. Hit the link below to see this stunning exhibit in action.


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We’ve been working on an advanced / pro color palette tool for quite some time and finally have it ready enough to share with you. We’re still fine tuning and adding more updates… but we feel like this is the best color palette tool you’ll find… if you don’t think so, let us know what you’d like us to add or improve and we’ll keep striving to give you the best experience anywhere.

Try COPASO : Color Palette Software Now

Click Here for a Larger Video Demo (Narrated and presented by Andrew Sorcini)

COPASO is an advanced color palette tool that helps you create the perfect color schemes and themes. With a scratch pad to save colors you’re working with, a photo tool to extract colors and an advanced color picker and color theory wheel to give you tons of color inspiration. Using COPASO you can save your palettes to a private folder or download them to keep on your local computer. When you’re ready, click publish and share your color palette with thousands of other color enthusiasts. If you’re finding COPASO a bit too rich you’re your color creating tastes, you can always use our basic color palette tool.
 
 

Custom Color Widths… Base, Secondary and Accent

With COPASO you can give each color a specific amount of space in your color palettes. This will help you show what colors you intend to be the base colors, secondary and accent colors. Click and drag the <|> icons above the color squares to change their widths.

Save Colors to Your Scratch Pad

You can save a color you’re working with by clicking and dragging it down to the scratch area. To set a main color above with one of the colors in your scratch, simply double-click the color in your scratch.

Get Color Inspiration from Pictures

Advanced Color Picker and Color Wheel

The new advanced color picker in COPASO allows for even more precise color selection. You have hue, saturation and brightness sliders as well as input areas for Hex, RGB, HSV and CMYK color values. Also built into the advanced color picker are gradient step filters that will allow you to see any color with steps towards white or with steps towards black. To work with any of the colors in this filter, simply click and drag the filter color strip to the right of the color wheel onto your scratch area. Below the picker is our color wheel and color formula filters. By selecting one of the formula filters (Blend, Complementary, Triadic Tetradic or Split Complementary) the color wheel will allow you to spin the selected color around by clicking anywhere on the wheel. Once you’ve found some great colors in the preview bar on the right, all you need to do is drag the bar to your scratch area to begin using those colors. Double-clicking any of the color squares in the preview bar will update the main color picker to that color and give you a new perspective on your selected color filters.

As mentioned above, we’re very proud of COPASO and hope you’ll find it very useful for all your professional and hobby color projects. COPASO couldn’t have been built without the expert programming of Chris Williams and the design work of Stephen Hallgren. Last but not least the hundreds of thousands of COLOURlovers who have helped us build and grow our color community and who’ve provided us with great advice, suggestions and inspiration over the years.

Happy COLOURloving!

HP has been doing some very cool things around color lately. One thing I recently stumbled onto is their Color Thesaurus. You enter in a color name and it gives you 4 similar named colors and 4 opposite colors. I used the tool to create the basic color wheel info below, but dive in and find out what colors are similar to Rose, Grass, Aqua, Ivory, etc.

The HP On-Line Color Thesaurus

The results that are returned are a large color square with a rendering of the color if it was found. If the name was not found, for example “greeb” was entered, then the next nearest color name in terms of edit distance, in this case “green”, will be returned. So no you won’t have to remember how to spell fuchsia. In addition to the colored square are the corresponding RGB and hexidecimal values. Finally there is a note about how common the color name is. Below this are the color synonyms and antonyms. Each column has smaller color squares rendering the color names and the names with links so that you can easily click-through to these names. The results are based on analysis of 20,000+ color name database in English collected from a 20+ language ongoing online color naming experiment.

Almost all of us use Adobe products in our professional and hobby design lives, but the new release of CS3 made it very hard for developers and websites like ours to allow users to get their palettes into the CS3 suite of products. CS3 uses a new format for storing color palettes aka schemes / swatches and Adobe kept their .ase file format a secret so that only Adobe Kuler could export to this format… Well, we’re not very good about NOT sharing the color love… so Chris our skilled code engineer poured over all the specifications and documentation on the file format to figure out how to share that .ase love with everybody.

The Adobe Swatch Exchange (.ase) File Format - Source Code

For any other color lovers, developers or creative individuals who would like their applications and websites to be able to spit out .ase color palettes…

Here is the .ASE Source Code we are using.
 

Downloading .ase Color Palettes from COLOURlovers

COLOURlovers has over 200,000 user created palettes with more than 25,000 being added monthly. Not only is the community a creative and fun place to share color ideas… those ideas can be used in several professional design programs.
 

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I can’t tell you the number of quizzes I’ve taken over the years trying to get an outside opinion about what’s going on inside my head, but the ones I’ve found most interesting are those that ask questions of the senses — other than sight — to find your “inner” colour. No matter where you go, however, the underlying theme with all of these quizzes suggests colour in personality, or personality in colour.

By age five, almost all of us have a favorite colour. Associating ourselves with that colour, surrounding ourselves with it, and forsaking all others (at some point) is common place. But what if your favorite colour doesn’t meet your inspirational needs? What if your energetic orange room doesn’t let you relax? What if your deep blue room doesn’t energize you? What if you need a different set of eyes to see what’s missing? Looking to expand on the colors you already know any love? Here are some places you can go to find out just what to do.

The Voice of Color

Paint is the cheapest and most dynamic way to change a room. While accuracy is always called into question, what interests me most about this room colour test is its approach. Found here on our very own forum, Pittsburgh Paints brings their answer to the typical, over-simplifying colour-personality quiz by asking about what tastes, smells, textures, and principles you hold in the highest. With Pittsburgh Paints, it’s all about you and your radically subjective world.

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Our friends over at ApartmentTherapy.com are putting their third annual fall colors contest to see who has the most color loving home. Win Up To $2500 from a total of $7500 in prizes to be awarded! - Thanks to subsomatic for reminding us.

How colorful is your home?

WHAT: Our Fall Colors Contest is a contest for all color lovers. We’re looking for the boldest, most beautiful, most colorful home in the world.

WHY: Color is a powerful part of interior design, and the cheapest way to change a room, but few feel comfortable using it. To inspire confidence, we’re going to share all of the best color homes, tips and sources, worldwide.

I’ve Got Color! - Fall Colors Contest 2007

Have you ever flown first class? Have you ever really wished you could? Well, the top ten from Forbes’ World’s Best First Class article seems to shoot down every actually-comfortable, well-padded seat I’ve walked past. From bed-chairs to private nooks, Heaven seems to recline at 40,000ft.

What are the Colors of a First Class Experience?

Taking a look at Forbes’ Top Ten was almost like a journey itself, but not through airspace — through color. The planes I’ve been on were all typically calming, hospital colors, but the concept photos from these airlines — ranked tenth to first — make me consider spending a little more money next time I fly, and a little more time shopping around, because all of the best colors are all around the world.

Qatar Airways

Flying first-class here means access to a separate terminal in Doha that mimics a five-star hotel with several fine-dining restaurants, a medical center, and a spa with sauna and Jacuzzi. On board passengers get caviar service, full-size pillows, white linen mattresses, Australian wool blankets and Bulgari toiletry kits. The seats are 79 inches long, have 15-inch LCD screens and come with a 23-inch meal table that allows dining for two, just as in a restaurant.

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