Spice inspired palettes and patterns from the COLOURlovers' Group Spices.

Colors & Palettes about Cinnamon, Pepper, Soy Sauce, Wasabi, Curry, Tamarind, Juniper, Anise, Lavender, Laurel, Nutmeg, Mint, Vanilla, ... here we go!

Palettes

We have more than 600k seamless background patterns and more than 1 million color palettes... Why aren't more sites using our API to give their users beautiful options for their profiles? Sounds like a no-brainer right? Well, I met Evan Williams (@ev) from twitter a few weekends ago and I presented this idea to him. He was open to it, but Twitter was super busy working on other features... BUT if we built it he'd definitely check it out. Well, Ev... Here she is!

Introducing... Themeleon for Twitter. Custom Themes by COLOURlovers

A Beautiful Twitter Profile in 3 Simple Steps:

1.) Login to Twitter

2.) Choose your background (pattern or photo) and your colors

3.) Save your settings. & Share your work

Browse Your COLOURlovers Creations & Faves

Want to create your theme using your own palettes and patterns from COLOURlovers?

Login and browse your New & Top patterns or palettes as well as your Favorite New & Top.

Use the Tools Luke!

-Apply. Although the wording is a bit cumbersome. You can apply the colors you have in your pattern to your color settings below & you can also apply colors you have in your settings below to a pattern template. *Click each of the buttons, it'll be obvious what they do... and then help us improve the wording on them :)*

-Shuffle. Click the button to give you some inspiration by mixing up the order of the colors in your settings area.

-Undo. Oops. Didn't mean to click there? Not sure what you were thinking with that last color choice? No worries, just click the undo button. (You can click it more than once to correct a spree of mis-clicking.)

-Drag & Drop. Click and drag any of the 5 color squares in your pattern preview or down in your color settings to change their order.

*New* DHTML Color Picker

While building themeleon we decided it was time to give our DHTML color picker a refresh. We not only updated the aesthetic we made it a bit bigger so the (S) Saturation and (V) Brightness sliders can fully display all 255 steps. We'll soon be releasing the code for this picker under the same terms as our previous picker to be freely used in any of your projects. (We did remove CMYK from this version for now as the conversions weren't working perfectly. It will find its way back in when we have it locked down.)

Use Themeleon on Your Site

Have a site that lets users customize their profile or create themes? Want to plug into the COLOURlovers API and use themeleon on your site? Let's talk! Hit me up @dariusmonsef or us @COLOURlovers... or just use our contact form ;)

Theme Leon? What does that mean?
No, no... Thee-mee-lee-uhn. Like Chameleon. Get it? As in a chameleon can change its colors... and you can change your theme colors... We're so proud of ourselves on this one. We didn't even go with our old trusty and take the first few lettes to make up a name... COlor PAlette SOftware (COPASO) & PHoto COlor PAlettes (PHOTOCOPA).

A Journey Around the Skull, which inspired a previous post, recommended checking out the textile blog Dots and Lines are Just Fine, and though just getting started with their collection, they still had plenty of inspiring palettes.

A selection of 100 patterns from the COLOURlovers' group Designfruit Ornate.

A selection of 100 patterns from the COLOURlovers' group African Abstractions: "Colours and patterns that evocate the culture of the African continent and its influence among other countries. Preference for abstract patterns."

Here's a selection of 94 patterns from the group Show your Tartans created back in October of 2007. To see more great plaids and tartans check out these other groups as well: Plaid Patterns, Plaid Pride, Plaids and Tartan Lovers and Wearable or Stareable Plaids. Feel free to link to other similar groups in the comments if there are others I missed.

For those of you a bit confused on the difference between plaid and tartan the short answer is that plaid is a piece of clothing and tartan is "any of numerous textile patterns consisting of stripes of varying widths and colors crossed at right angles against a solid background." To learn more check out this forum and these pages: Tartan & Plaid.

A nice write up about the latest wallpaper trends and tips on how to best incorporate them into your home or office by House to Home.

Archive designs

Wallpapers taken from the archives are historic but far from old-fashioned. Follow our tips to make a traditional archive-print wallpaper work beautifully in your home.

• You don’t have to live in an old house for these wallpapers to work, but, for best effect, choose a design that suits the scale of your home. For example, the small florals typical of the 1930s can look lost in a high-ceilinged room, while heavily patterned Victorian prints can overwhelm a small or low-ceilinged space.

• To make a beautiful wallcovering the focus of the room, pick out key colours from the design and repeat them in plain fabrics and painted woodwork.

• To mix in other prints without outshining the wallpaper, stick to a limited colour palette. Alternatively, choose another print from the same collection – they’re grouped to co-ordinate, so the hard work’s been done for you.

• If you like an eclectic look, you can team an archive wallpaper with modern furniture, but echo the design – for example, a pattern with gentle curves will look better with furniture in curved shapes.

• If you want to find a paint that matches the tones used in an archive wallpaper, look at heritage and period paint collections.

Geometrics

Love geometric wallpaper? Use it to create a fabulous look with these simple rules.

Continuing our vintage fabric series, today we're looking at some great color inspiration from a collection of pink vintage fabrics. This collection, along with plenty of other fine image sets, can be found here, and were put together by True Up, which happens to be wonderful resource for fabric news.

Wrapped up nicely for the holidays, here are 29 inspiring vintage holiday wrapping papers. Hopefully, this great collection from xtinalamb will not only give you some color inspiration, but maybe inspire to reuse paper, or start your own collection to help avoid the extra 5 million tons of waste generated each year during the winter holidays; four million tons of this is wrapping paper and shopping bags (source).

Continuing our vintage fabric series, today we're looking at some great color inspiration from a collection of blue vintage fabrics. This collection, along with plenty of other fine image sets, can be found here, and were put together by True Up, which happens to be wonderful resource for fabric news.

Purple Fabric