This is a Guest post by illustrator and web designer Gerren Rabideau. You can see the original post here, or check out the rest of his work over at Gerren Design.

Once upon a time I was building a website and one of the colors I had picked out just wasn't quite right. I kept having to pop in and out of photoshop in order to tweak the color I was using. I didn't understand the Hex code enough to adjust it on the fly. After about an hour of tediously going back and forth with photoshop I gave up and started scouring the internet for a method of using hex code without another visual tools.

Like most people I discovered multiple sites that explain how HTML uses hexadecimal notation (xxxxxx) to define color. Hex code uses base-16 math to write a shorthand version of the binary code that is used to represent each of the different colors in the RGB color set. For instance, #f9f9f9 would be translated into RGB as 249,249,249 and then into binary as 111110011111100111111001. If that was too confusing, just think of #f9f9f9 as "off-white".

This article isn't really about explaining how the hexadecimal color system works. You can find plenty of websites out there that can explain that far better than I can. This article is about developing a method of thinking about hex code that will allow you to read and manipulate it without having to pop into photoshop in order to see the color itself. I've been calling this method "grey 88".

Before I get into that though, lets talk about color sets for a minute...

I come from a fine artist's background and learned about color by applying it to paint. I had my crayon set and yellow plus blue made green. This is because painting is a subtractive color set based on pigments. The chemicals used in creating the paint would react with each other when mixed and create green. You start with a white canvas and add colors until you get black. CMYK works in the same way. Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow are pigments that are mixed to create darker colors (black is also used, but only to reduce the need of having to mix CMY all of the time).

CMYK (subtractive color) pigment based

By default, photoshop, your computer monitor, and HTML files use RGB. RGB is an additive color set that is based on mixing light instead of pigments. Your monitor starts with black and adds different spectrums of light until you get white. In RGB the three primary colors are Red, Green, and Blue.

RGB (additive color) light based

Because RGB is based on light it has a much wider gamut of colors than pigment based color sets. In fact, all of the colors in CMYK are also in RGB (the reverse is not true). This means that Hex is unique in the sense that it is really has both RGB and CMYK.

While some might argue that the most colorful apps for your iPhone are those that mimic flatulence, and there are more than enough of those available, here are some colorful apps that are a little more useful, fun and at least in better taste. To download the apps just simply search for the name in the iTunes store.

iSteam $0.99 Welcome the first "steamy" photo editor for the iPhone / iPod touch. Turn your device into a foggy surface just like our mirror after a hot shower or as your window on a winter day. iSteam exploits all features of your device... - blow on your mic to haze the screen / use your fingers to write messages and draw, etc...

Mood Touch $0.99 Happy? Sad? Stressed? Mood Touch will tell you! It's designed to have you interact with it to determine the mood that you're feeling as you touch it.

Quadrum:colors $0.99 This is a new action-puzzle game with colors - a brand new twist on the match 3 formula. The basic rules are simple - you slide rows and columns of colored tiles to combine groupd (verticle or horizonal lines) of the same color and double-tap to remove them from the screen...

Bloom $3.99 Generative, ambient music by Brian Eno. The app also allows you to create ellaborate patterns and unique melodies by simply apping the screen. Part instrument, part composition, part artwork, and totally awesome.

The folks over at worldlabel.com had an idea to create an easy way for people to create their own cd and address labels using palettes geometric patterns and color palettes, and asked the members here at COLOURlovers to contribute designs for an exhibition. Here's what they had to say about worldlabels.com and the COLOURlovers Exhibition:

This whole exhibition idea started when one of the employees at Worldlabel.com a manufacture of blank laser and inkjet printer labels started using a colour palette to design geometric patterns.

We took these design and created a label template so folks could personalize and print. It looked great, we thought an exhibition would be a great idea, so we asked on the COLOURlovers forum if anyone would want to contribute designs for an exhibition and received several contributions. Lyell Rodieck, GreenMyEyes, submitted over 50 designs. The result of this collaborative effort is an online exhibition of CD and address label templates which can be personalized, and downloaded for free on display at WorldLabel.com.

Deciding on a favorite to download is the hardest part to getting started. Once you decide, click the template you want to download. The templates are created in Open document Format (ODF) and are easily viewed by any of these office suites: OpenOffice.org, Koffice, Staroffice IBM Lotus Symphony, or any other office suite supporting the OpenDocument format. WordPerfect Office X4 has native ODF support.

Digital art is only in its infancy and already we have seen so many great examples of amazing work. It is hard to imagine what we will see as this medium continues to develope and the images and colors become even more unbelievable...

Here are some of the more colorful videos and images created using one of the programs making this art possible, processing.

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is an open project initiated by Ben Fry and Casey Reas, and it can be freely downloaded from www.processing.org.

Videos

If you're looking for a new way to find color inspiration in your photos, try this simple Photoshop technique to pull out colors from a single pixel line and create some unique color artworks... there are so many vastly different results from the same images depending on where you select the single pixel line. Try it out:

Photoshop Instructions

-Open Any Photo You Want
-Use the Single Row Marquee Tool & Select a Single Pixel Row
-Transform (CTRL+T) & Stretch to Full Height
-Then Use Filter > Artistic > Dry Brush

A Gallery of Single Pixel Color Explorations

Birds in Wheat by Mike Ruggirello

Polyvore is a member based web application that allows its users to sort through uploaded images or those grabbed from around the web, to create collages for inspiration and to share with others.

The site's main focus is fashion, but also includes interiors and whatever else people can come up with. Filter through the images by garment or accessory type, brand and color. With the color sorter it would seemingly make it very easy to put together the perfect outfit palette, making it a useful tool for any color lover.

Polyvore was founded by ex-Yahoo executive Pasha Sadri. While branded as fun creative collage site that makes use of the infinite amounts of content available on the web, Polyvore also allows its users to shop the products that they use in their collages. Click on any item, and a product description will appear along with the original link where the item can be found.

The direct engagement of real products and brands with its users is some what of a dream for marketers, as the model is basically user-generated advertising.

In the U.S. 7% of the male population – or about 10.5 million men – and 0.4% of the female population either cannot distinguish red from green, or see red and green differently. Color blindness affects a significant amount of the population, and it is even more prevalent in more isolated populations with a smaller gene pools. It is mostly a genetic condition, though it can be caused by eye, nerve, or brain damage, or due to exposure to certain chemicals.

For those of us who see colors just fine, it is hard to imagine what those with color blindness are seeing. Luckily humans are smart and have created technology like the Color Blind Web Page Filter.

Popular Websites: As Seen by the Color Blind

The Color Blind Web Page Filter, which was used in this post to demonstrate the different types of colorblindness, allows you to view what a site looks like to people with each type of color blindness. Here are a few examples from some popular websites.

Iconic Art: As Seen by the Color Blind

Some would say we all see art in our own unique way... that would be especially true for the color blind. Here are a couple examples of some of the most iconic paintings as seen by the color blind.

Color Blindness Background

Using the filter we'll take a look at the current most popular palette, July, and how it is seen by those with different types of color blindness.

The normal human retina contains two kinds of light cells: the rod cells (active in low light) and the cone cells (active in normal daylight). Normally, there are three kinds of cones, each containing a different pigment. The cones are activated when the pigments absorb light. The absorption spectra of the cones differ; one is maximally sensitive to short wavelengths, one to medium wavelengths, and the third to long wavelengths (their peak sensitivities are in the blue, yellowish-green, and yellow regions of the spectrum, respectively). The absorption spectra of all three systems cover much of the visible spectrum, so it is not entirely accurate to refer to them as "blue", "green" and "red" receptors, especially because the "red" receptor actually has its peak sensitivity in the yellow. The sensitivity of normal color vision actually depends on the overlap between the absorption spectra of the three systems: different colors are recognized when the different types of cone are stimulated to different extents. Red light, for example, stimulates the long wavelength cones much more than either of the others, and reducing wavelength causes the other two cone systems to be increasingly stimulated, causing a gradual change in hue. Many of the genes involved in color vision are on the X chromosome, making color blindness more common in males than in females.

Idée Labs has created a useful set of online image search tools, including a multicolor search that allows you to filter images using a palette of up to ten colors. Using a spectrum color selector, you can pick the colors you are looking for and it will return only photos that contain those colors.

Multicolr Search Lab

With the Multicolr Search Lab you are able to search up to ten different colors from a palette of 120 different shades. The search will filter through three million 'interesting' flickr photos or three million Alamy stock photos.

Many of you here in the community are quite familiar with the color tools available on COLOURlovers (if you're new to the site a good place to start is the FAQ), but what about other helpful color tools that might exist somewhere on the internet. Well, here are two such tools: 'Name That Color' and 'Color Name & Hue', that I came across recently; one for color vocabulary and identification, the other, a helpful tool for those who are colorblind.

'Name That Color'

'Name That Color' is a helpful little site created by a dude with other dudes in mind, but it most certainly will also help those of the female variety.

For those of us who can't exactly remember, or who never knew, what color Danube is, and others who just want to expand their color vocabulary, so instead of red you can use Monza, even though it is totally just Red, might want to check it out.

Simply create a color manually or enter the Hex code to reveal what you mistakenly took for Mojo, when it was, in fact, Mule Fawn.

The database was created from names found on Wikipedia, Crayola, and the Resene Color-Name Dictionary. It's probably good that he didn't try to use the COLOURlovers library of color names. Besides what an interminable task it would be, he would probably have more than a few colors with the same name, but that are on complete opposite ends of the spectrum, or, all the colors would be named 'love.' And while I personally prefer to make up color names on-the-fly, like the Suddlepup shirt I'm currently wearing, it might be nice to be able to narrow it down to around Burnt Sienna if, god forbid, you had to discus color with your designer or decorator over the phone.

With the release of the COLOURlovers API, you can now access 1.4 million named colors and more than 500,000 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.