When I first started this site 7 years ago, it was a quick and easy decision to call it COLOURlovers: It was all about color for people who loved it. But now with 1.5M members from around the world who have loved, err, liked more than 10,000,000 pieces of shared content... I think we can all agree, that's just too much love!

It's also worth noting that in the current state of the world with ongoing wars, political tension, financial implosions... What the world really doesn't need is more love. That's why I'm super excited to share with you the new & waaaay better COLOURlikers!

It's just like the old COLOURlovers, but now without any of the love. What has love ever done anyway?! You're all probably used to liking things on Facebook anyway, so this should be an easy transition.

Start Sharing the Like!

So go check out the profiles of other likers. Go like some palettes or patterns. Share the like!

Don't worry, we're kidding. Happy April Fools. We still love you.

Life is a fragile thing and it always hurts the heart when somebody passes well before their time. We're deeply saddened by the loss of one of our active, loving, creative & supportive members; sunmeadow. She leaves many friends here in our community and we're incredibly honored to have the privilege to continue hosting & sharing her creations with the world. We may have 1.5 million members now, but every single one is important to me and is greatly appreciated. We love you sunmeadow and thank you for all you shared with us and all the inspiration you will continue to share.

A close friend of hers let me know of the sad news. They also noted that she was a very private person and that she would appreciate her personal details not be shared here. I will respect her wishes and ask you to do the same.

Her last palette randomly created was entitled "Wings To Fly" and I believe she has them now. I can't possibly honor all that she shared here with us in one post, but I'll share some of her most popular creations below... and please feel free to share yours in the comments.

Sunmeadow: Colors | Palettes | Patterns | Templates

Sunmeadow also created hundreds of beautiful pattern templates. Here are just some of them:

Thank you Sunmeadow. Rest in peace.

Welcome to the Community Roundup! Each week I will be pulling some great stuff from the nooks and crannies of COLOURlovers to feature here on the community forefront - the blog. You can expect everything from member-hosted games and contests to some fun finds you might otherwise miss. So let's dig up what's happening.

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Member-Hosted Contests

We are lucky to have some very motivated COLOURlovers in our community. Here are a couple of great contests going on with plenty of time to join up and play.

If you are new to COLOURlovers, pattern templates are designed by members using Seamless Studio (Mac/PC desktop) or Seamless Lite (free / web version). If you have questions about Seamless you can contact me or your fellow COLOURlovers.

Carnival Template Contest hosted by Sunmeadow :: NOW until Feb. 21st 2012

The festive and colorful season of Carnival is now in full swing. Carnival is celebrated by over 10 million people worldwide from New Orleans (Mardi Gras) to Carnival in Rio de Janiero, Brazil and all through the carribean Islands. Group leader, sunmeadow, is hosting a Carnival Template Challenge. All are welcome to partcipate, from beginning template makers to seasoned pros. The challenge started this week and closes on February 21st, when five winners will be announced and featured on the COLOURlovers blog and Facebook page.

Reference Tag: CTC-1

Shamrock Template Challenge hosted by o2bqueen & rubyvillasenor :: NOW until March 16th 2012

With the month of March approaching, we have St. Patricks Day fast approaching! The challenge is to design a template that includes a shamrock shape. This challenge has already started and ends March 16th 2012. The top five designs will be featured on COLOURlovers blog and Facebook page.

Reference Tag: STC12

Learn About Tags & Tagging Here

Along with posting on the blog, I will actually post each template in their fully colored state (as those are more exciting than a grayscale template). So make sure to include a nice colored version with your submissions.

Please feel free to contact me (mollybermea) if you have an organized challenge you would like posted to this community announcement.

Happy Valentines Day! Our community has created and named millions of user-named colors that help us create, innovate, and celebrate the joy of color itself.

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Some of the “most loved” include "
Color by COLOURlovers" target="_blank">Dutch Teal" by Skyblue2u, "Haunted milk" by alpen, "Vitamin C" by GreenLantern, "Chartreuse" by oeln, and "Juicy Pink" by MetteBB. It is almost too obvious to say that WE LOVE COLOR!

Color is infused into every aspect of our lives, especially those in our color bubble, so we thought it was time to devote a big Valentine to Color itself! Although we couldn’t include all the colors in the rainbow, here are some colors that really touch our hearts on Valentine’s Day.

Your email registered on COLOURlovers will receive a mighty delicious treat today! That's right! Today we sent out the very first newsletter in the history of COLOURlovers. From now forward, you will know every Tuesday as - Huesday!

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You can expect to receive this beautiful Huesday newsletter each week to get your fill of colorful ideas, inspiration and special goodies (aka giveaways, contests, announcements and the like) sometimes only available in the weekly Huesday mailing.

patterns featured this Huesday: The Dark Snow | Dulce Aroma | santa came to town

As you might know, we currently hand pick colors, palettes, patterns for daily Facebook and Twitter features (you are notified if your creation was featured). Now, Huesday will be another excellent platform for member creations to be featured because there are so many fantastic patterns, palettes and shapes to know about. We will include most popular as well as some hand-picked.

more patterns featured this Huesday: it's raining! | Duckling's Splash | sight

Don't miss out on getting some great inspiration, awesome announcements and must know COLOURlovin news each and every colorful Huesday.

Templates to the featured patterns:

Some of you may already know our own sec9586, some of you may have just heard of her as the designer of the Betabrand plaid pattern, "Betabrand2" in our contest, "Color a Plaid Shirt Contest by Betabrand + COLOURlovers". Either way, we're featuring her today so you can get to know her even better!

Shawna Crouch, aka "sec9586", is the owner / operator of CrouchDesign. She attended Murray State University, where she graduated with a BS in Studio Art/Graphic Design in 2009, and specializes primarily in print design. Along with her designing day job, she runs a small shop on Zazzle as CrouchDesign, where she offers freelance design services. She also has an Etsy shop,  AquaNetNightmare, set to reopen September 1st, 2011 which will offer jewelry, cards, invitations, stationary and drawings.

Shawna continually uses COLOURlovers in every which way for both work and fun. Let's take a peek at how she does it...

What we love more than anything is helping people share their ideas & inspirations. A couple years ago we added the ability for members to color in 100 preset pattern templates and we saw your creativity flourish, but we also saw an even greater opportunity... To give you all the power to design your own pattern templates!

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And without being able to save your work, import your own custom shapes, work only in grayscale... and with only our simple web version of Seamless, in the past 12 months our awesome members created more than 80,000 original seamless patterns.

So it's with great excitement for the amazing creations that will be shared that we release the more powerful desktop version of Seamless Studio!

Special COLOURlovers Member Price

And as a special thank you to all our supportive members here at COLOURlovers, we're giving you a $20 discount on the regular price of $49, just for being a member. Thanks for Sharing the Love!

A Showcase of Amazing Seamless Patterns

It truly is magical what you all are able to create using simple shapes and only 5 colors... Check out the Showcase to see some examples of the wonderful patterns being created with Seamless Studio. Or check it out for yourself, Download a FREE 15 Day Trial of Seamless Studio...

Beautiful, Easy to Use & Affordable

Existing pattern design tools & software were expensive, hard to use & not much fun to play with. So as part of our mission to make design super easy and accessible to everyone, we made a beautiful, user friendly & affordable vector pattern design app. These are just some of the features we packed into Seamless Studio:

Import Custom Shapes
Open SVGs from other editors to use in your patterns.

Export to Other Formats
Save your pattern as a SVG, PNG, or JPG image.

Layers / Groups
Organize and rearrange shapes simply.

Save / Open
Create projects and come back to them later.

Easy Upload
Upload your patterns straight to COLOURlovers.com.

Line Tool
Create wavy, sawtooth, straight, dashed, and dotted lines.

Infinitely Scalable
Export SVGs that scale beautifully to any resolution.

& More...
 

Start Sharing Your Patterns with the World!

Not only can you publish your patterns right to COLOURlovers.com from the app, you can also export your patterns as high res files to use in your own creative projects. Upload them to Spoonflower to get custom fabric! Print them out and sell them as part of a craft pack on Etsy! Turn a pattern into beautiful wall art with Imagekind! ...Woohoo!

Ever since the first palettes were shared on COLOURlovers I've wanted to see their awesomeness in print... And a few years ago I got in contact with the fine folks at HOW books who also wanted to help make it happen. We're stoked and honored to be able to share 3,000 amazing color palettes from our community in a printed book with readers in real life.

Color Inspirations is on Pre-order at Amazon. Check it out!

Palette Galleries

3,000 palettes to be exact have been selected and organized by hue into a printed inspiration gallery. Each palette proudly displaying its name as well as the name of the member who created it and the HEX, RGB & CMYK values for the colors in the palette. The index of the book has each palette name, creator and a link to its page here on COLOURlovers... so new offline lovers can connect to the community online.

Inspiration & Information

Along with the 3,000 color palettes there are 10 inspirational and informational color articles.
Thanks to Dave, our long time blog writer, for help putting it all together!

A Who's Who of Awesome Palette Makers!

We gathered the palettes for Color Inspirations 2 years ago, so unfortunately we're missing some of our wonderful new members creations in the book... but we still managed to share 1,000+ member's palettes. We've been honored to showcase your work here on COLOURlovers and give you some recognition in the physical world too!. All the members who have a palette in the book are listed below:

A Note on Palette Sourcing

Before we had a chance to announce the book, some members found it and posted some concerns about how we sourced the palettes. Members were also surprised it had never been mentioned... Our bad. We should have done a better job keeping you all informed.
As for rights, no worries. You still own the rights to all the creations you share here on COLOURlovers, but you also extend us the right to share your work commercially, like here on this website and in promotional projects like this book.

Of the many word-based games played on ColourLovers, one of the newest is HAIKU PALETTES & POETIC PATTERNS where Lovers create palettes and poems at the same time from the words in the color names. The group began in January 2011 and quickly grew to 20 members in its first few days. Membership has more than doubled in less than the three to four months since the group was launched.

The Autumn Queen HPP

by Luna Rose

Upon rainbow throne
Bright and bold - The Autumn Queen
A sight to behold

April is National Poetry Month - A note from the editor

The month of April has many national celebrations, one of those being National Poetry Month. Before we draw this month to a close, we want to feature one of our most recent, popular groups, the HPP, managed by ketisse, a COLOURlover who is very passionate about writing and poetry. I personally think that it is amazing how she has invented a way for COLOURlovers to work with color, pattern and palettes to create poetry - the process is truly intriguing!

Today, the group currently boasts:

• 178 COLORS
  
• 179 PALETTES
  
• 184 PATTERNS
  
• 67 LOVERS

I hope you enjoy learning about the group itself and learning how to create a Haiku through palettes. ketisse has put together a very through guest post about her group and the creation process.

- Molly Bermea / Community Curator & Blog Editor

Can you believe it? COLOURlovers is up for a Best Community nomination AGAIN! This makes 5-years running, a record for Webby Nominations (pending confirmation from the Webby people). The Webby Awards are billed as the Oscars of the internet, and being nominated this many years in a row just keeps emphasizing how much love we get from our community. You are all truly great lovers!

We Need Your Vote + Love!

The Webby website can be a little overwhelming so don't turn tail and run the first moment you check out where to vote! Plus, you are allowed ONLY ONE VOTE per category (i.e. can only pick one community to win).

Step 1: Register to Vote

Yep, to vote you must be a registered voter. It's pretty quick and painless: www.webby.aol.com

Step 2: Find COLOURlovers Under the COMMUNITY Category

From the main menu hover over WEBSITES and find the COMMUNITY category. Remember to be logged in as a REGISTERED USER.

Step 3: The Ballot

When you get to the COMMUNITY page, you'll notice a bunch of categories above and below it. Of course ignore those and get straight to your vote! HERE IS A DIRECT LINK TO THE BALLOT

Bonus Step: Tell Them Why We Rock!

Chances are we won't win a popularity contest with Twitter, which has more than 200 Million users... But we can show them how passionate and supportive our smaller community is by leaving a comment of what you love about COLOURlovers. Once you've cast your vote, you can click the COLOURlovers name to view our entry page... and at the bottom is the comment area for you to share the love.

Help Spread the COLOURlove

We will be tweeting and facebooking this DAILY, so Re-Tweets, Shares and more will be much appreciated - You can TWEET or SHARE this article on your Twitter/Facebook too!

Tell your friends and family, leave fliers on cars at your local grocers, facebook it, Twitter it, rent a billboard to shout it to the world! You can also add a nifty little badge to your blog and/or website and anywhere else that accepts an HTML badge.

COPY either badge code below and PASTE to your blog/site:

<a href="http://www.colourlovers.com/web/blog/2011/04/14/webby-awards-best-community-nominee-x5"><img title="Vote for COLOURlovers for the Webby Awards!" src="http://static.colourlovers.com/uploads/2011/04/WebbyBadge_400x385.jpg" alt="Vote for COLOURlovers for the Webby Awards!" width="400" height="385" border="0" /></a>

<a href="http://www.colourlovers.com/web/blog/2011/04/14/webby-awards-best-community-nominee-x5"><img title="Vote for COLOURlovers for the Webby Awards!" src="http://static.colourlovers.com/uploads/2011/04/WebbyBadge_200x193.jpg" alt="Vote for COLOURlovers for the Webby Awards!" width="200" height="193" border="0" /></a>

An Awesomely Supportive Community - That's You!

We love our color community and appreciate all the support you give us day in and day out. COLOURlovers is ever growing in numbers and functionality. We wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for each and every lover on COLOURlovers. What once was a whim, a weekend idea from our uber-cool founder Darius (aka COLOURlover), is now a thriving, loving community. You just don't see this much passion in other communities. So thank you times a million and stay awesome!