Art

Nonsensical Infographics by Chad Hagen

Portfolio

Diffraction by Voss

Portfolio | Muuuz

Based in Marseille, Voss is a creative studio founded by Etienne Rey and Laurent Le Bourhis. Working from resins, paper, acrylic, glass and polymers, both artists play with light, transparencies and reflections to devise space sensitive installations.

Tools

0 to 255

Link

0 to 255 is a simple tool that helps web designers find variations of any color.

Videos

Mia Doi Todd "Open Your Heart by Micheal Gondry

Via Let's Colour Project

Header Image

iPhone

World Cup Collection From Uncommon

Uncommon Collections

The collection has all 32 qualifying team flags and four general soccer designs. Uncommon will be knocking teams out of the collection as they are knocked out of the tournament. So once your team is out, the flag case is gone.

API Love

Bookmarklet For Palette/Pattern Browser

Bookmarklet | Browser |  CL Forum

ycc2106 made a great bookmarklet for the palette/pattern browser a little while back. If you select a username with your cursor and click the bookmarklet it'll take you to the browser with that user's stuff. If you don't have anything selected it opens a window to enter the username. Super handy.

With permission, cuttlefish is hosting it now. Just drag the links into your bookmarks bar to use it.

Thanks ycc2106!

- COLOURlovers Forum

Nature

Bees Use Flower Petals For Colorful Nest Wallpaper

Story @ NPR

When we think of bee nests, we often think of a giant hive, buzzing with social activity, worker bees and honey. But scientists recently discovered a rare, solitary type of bee that makes tiny nests by plastering together flower petals. - Continue Reading

Sport

Body Sails

Sporting Sails

Mobile Applications

Colorendar: iPhone Calendar

brinimal APP | iTunes AppStore

Developed by Mitsuhiro Sugimori (brinimal APP), colorendar allows you to add customized (RGB color tool) color tags to represent each day's mood or events. More than a calendar, the app then monitors your color use and graphs the results along with that month's moon cycle. Simple and beautiful, colendar offers a unique view into our colorful lives.

This is a guest post by rockstarkate.

In this tutorial rockstarkate combines the use of COLOURlovers Palette Tools (COPASO, PHOTOCOPA, COLOR PICKER) and Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator to create multiwidth Palettes blends. It is also possible to do this with other graphic apps such as Gimp, Painter & Corel.

Using Photoshop

Short Version

1.) find the two palettes you want to use and arrange them in photoshop with one on the top and one on the bottom. put them both on the same layer with space in between.
2.) make a selection for the first blend. There are several ways you could do this. I use the Magic Wand tool on the two rectangles of color then the Polygonal Lasso tool to add the connection.
3.) select one color as your foreground color and the other as your background color.
4.) make a new layer and fill the selection with a gradient of your two colors.
5.) repeat, placing each blend on its own layer.
6.) I can't seem to make a perfect selection and there is space inbetween each blend. I select each layer and nudge it to the left until the space is gone.
7.) Voila! That was easy, wasn't it?

Long Version

1.) find the two palettes you want to use and arrange them in photoshop with one on the top and one on the bottom. put them both on the same layer with space in between.

2.) make a selection for the first blend. There are several ways you could do this. I use the Magic Wand tool on the two rectangles of color then the Polygonal Lasso tool to add the connection.

Some people call them color palettes and some people call them color schemes... Now we're all part of one big family. We've known Aaron from ColorSchemer for a few years now and have talked on and off about how we could work together. Well, I'm excited to announce that we're not just working together, we're joining color forces.

The new release of ColorSchemer Studio 2 for Mac of is the first hint at what the future holds for that partnership with the integration of the 1,000,000 COLOURlovers palettes directly accessible via the software gallery browser. Pretty soon you'll not only be able to browse palettes from COLOURlovers, you'll be able to save your palettes right to our site from your desktop. You'll see the best of what we've been building and the best from what Aaron's been building begin to form together here and in ColorSchemer Studio.

ColorSchemer Studio 2 for Mac OS X

ColorSchemer Studio 2 is a professional color-matching application for your Mac that will help you build beautiful color schemes quickly and easily.

Use ColorSchemer Studio to identify color harmonies for the web (RGB) or print (CMYK), create palettes from photos, search over a million existing color schemes, mix colors, create gradient blends, and much more!

ColorSchemer Studio 2 takes color matching and management to a new level with a number of advanced new features and tools, including:

CMYK Support

One of the most common feature requests we get is for adding CMYK support, and now ColorSchemer Studio 2 has it!

Not only that, but this new release goes even further by color-managing both RGB and CMYK colors, so you can specify color profiles (just like in Photoshop and other pro graphics apps) to make sure your colors look exactly as you intended.

Color Management/Color Profile Support

ColorSchemer Studio 2 now color-manages all displayed colors. You can now work with specific color profiles to ensure your color-critical work comes out right the first time, whether it’s for the web or print.

COLOURlovers Integration

Connect to the COLOURlovers community to browse, search, and download over a million color palettes right from the program.

LiveSchemes – Color relationships that you define

The new LiveSchemes tools help you to visually create color harmony relationships as easily as dragging colors around the color wheel.

Create custom LiveScheme formulas based on color theory, or your own creativity. You can also reverse-engineer and color-shift existing color schemes with a simple drag & drop.

Browse your saved LiveSchemes to apply custom color theory relationships to any color to build a ready-to-use color scheme.

QuickPreview Layout Templates

ColorSchemer Studio 2 now comes with 13 different QuickPreview layout templates that you can use to experiment with color scheme ideas in a variety of different settings, including website, blog, print and pattern layouts.

Color Variations

Use the new Variations palette to find colors that are similar or related to any starting base color.

Color Groups

Organize your colors into groups or folders within your Favorite Colors when building your color schemes.

ColorSchemer Studio 2 also adds a bunch of other enhancements to give you more control over your colors:

• New ways to pick colors: Use the new spectrum picker, or select from among the included color libraries.
• New import/export formats: Including Adobe Swatch Exchange (ASE), PNG, and XML formats.
• Enhanced Contrast Analyzer Check text and background color combinations for sufficient contrast and readability, based on W3C, WCAG, or HP accessibility recommendations.
• Drag-color-to-text Drag a color from ColorSchemer Studio and drop it right into your HTML and it will automatically be converted into a hex value in your code.
• Improved UI: Most tool windows have been combined into an easier-to-manage single-window interface.

Happy Huesdays: Special COLOURlovers Offer

In the spirit of Black Friday... we're extending a more colorful offer. If you purchase a license of ColorSchemer Studio in December and get a FREE Sponsored Membership on COLOURlovers as a thank you (a $20 value).

Just email us with your Order Number for ColorSchemer Studio and your COLOURlovers username and we'll upgrade your account. (Already a Sponsored Member? We'll give you a gift credit to use next year or give away.)

Licenses/Upgrades

ColorSchemer Studio 2 remains $49.99 per license, and discounted upgrade licenses are also available for registered users of ColorSchemer Studio v1.x for $29.99.

» Purchase a license
» Upgrade your license
» More info

Also, if you purchased ColorSchemer Studio v1.x after Oct 1, 2009, you are entitled to a free upgrade to ColorSchemer Studio 2. Visit the myColorSchemer section and enter your Order Number to upgrade your license key.

As Always... You Can Make it Better

This isn't just a product to sell you... this is a product for us to grow together. We've always taken special care to only work with quality products and never compromise the wonderful community and culture we have here. The partnership with ColorSchemer is brand new, so we've only had a little amount of time to work on integrating our services. We plan on bringing the best of both worlds together in the future and you can help us with that.
-What would you like to see ColorSchemer include from COPASO?
-What would you like to see COLOURlovers bring online from ColorSchemer?
Aaron is now a part of the COLOURlovers family, so welcome him and and let him know how he can help you share the love.

+D

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

Ok... So he likes it... He really likes it!

@ev "Holy crap, this is rad: @COLOURlovers built a Twitter theme designer: http://colourlovers.com/themeleon/twitter"

So does Twitter!
@Twitter "Can't get enough of the @COLOURlovers app! A slick customization tool for your Twitter background. #appwednesday"

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).

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

cyan (00ffff)

magenta (ff00ff)

yellow (ffff00)

black (000000)

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

red (ff0000)

green (00ff00)

blue (0000ff)

white (ffffff)

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