Grace Bonney design*sponge Position: Writer & Editor Location: Brooklyn, NYC

Grace has a great eye for design and a wonderful way of sharing neat new things...

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James Clerk Maxwell (1831-79), a Scottish physicist, is credited with the first production of a colour photograph. Maxwell used the additive principle of colour, in which primary colors of light are projected and combined to create intermediate colors, as the basis for his photographic experiments. Using red, green and blue colour filters on a light-sensitive medium coated in monochrome emulsions, Maxwell was able to take three separate photographs of a tartan ribbon. The three developed images were projected onto a screen using three separate projectors. The effect was a full colour picture.

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My Dear COLOURloving Friends & Family,

I spent Christmas last year with volunteers and survivors of Hurricane Katrina in Biloxi, Mississippi. We had the 100+ volunteers who were living with us in staple standard tube socks to a wall painted like a fireplace and at 2am I got up… Donned a Santa costume and filled the stockings with knick-knacks and little gifts for the volunteers.

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This year I'm spending it with a village buried by Typhoon Durian in the central Philippines. This is the second year that I'm giving up spending time with my family and the people I love, so I'm asking you to give up a little during the holidays as well:

Please donate to Hands On Disaster Response and support my Non-Profit's efforts to make a difference in communities affected by natural disasters. We are a registered 501c3 Non-Profit and on our website you can view our financial statements. www.HODR.org I'm personally asking my friends and family to donate $100 securely online via: https://secure.ga1.org/05/hodr_darius. If you're having a very tight month then I would ask you to pass this note along and to ask someone else you know to make a donation.

It has become increasingly important in my life to be a global citizen. As a westerner we are born and raised with such a US-Centric view of the world. Even our news pays little attention to what goes on outside our country. Many people probably don't know that a Typhoon (The same thing as a Hurricane) hit the central Philippines destroying over 100,000 homes in early Dec. You may have seen a little news blip if you were really looking, but otherwise it disappeared from the news with little attention. I arrived in Manila yesterday and am now in the Typhoon Durian affected area. If you have any questions about the project here or are interested in volunteering, please shoot me an email.

Thank you for supporting me and my relief work and Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year.

"Be the change you wish to see in the world."

Darius A Monsef IV
Co-Founder & Operations Director
Hands On Disaster Response
www.HODR.org

We've been adding little features here and there, and I wanted to let anyone know who might have missed them.

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RSS Feeds
The feeds are up and everyone has their own too. Subscribe to the feeds with FeedBurner. Some people have begun to do some interesting things with them as well. One web designers is using the feed of the top colors on CL to dynamically change the colors of his new website design to what the top colors are.

Wallpapers
Look in the Info area for all colors and palettes for links to several wallpaper sizes. Set your desktop wallpaper to one of your favorites on CL and make some COLOURlove even when you aren't online.

COLOURstats
We put the first phase and very simple stats overview up on the homepage. You can see them right under the welcome blurb. Right now we’re just showing how many new colors, palettes and lovers are being added to the site daily.

Soon this stats display will be combined with the trends system to show even more interesting information, like how many negative or positive votes hues like blue got for a certain month... or how well people reacted to palettes with yellow in them in Nov... Etc.

Cheers,
-Darius

Jobs for Designers, Artists, and Developers with instant search tool

At COLOURlovers.com it is all about the love... and you should love your job. Life just isn't any fun if you hate going to work.

In partnership with Krop jobs we're sharing the love of creativity and providing a listing service for the best creative jobs out there. Take a look through and find something that strikes your fancy. New jobs are being added daily, so keep your eyes on www.COLOURlovers.com/jobs. You can easily find the jobs section in the main site menu.

If you are looking to hire, than get your opportunity out there to thousands of people who love colour, design and creativity. Jobs posted to the Krop network are shown on major creative portals like: Newstoday, Lodown Magazine, COLOURlovers, Lounge 72, Heavy Backpack, Fecal Face, iwantmyflashtv, DevLounge, Digitalabstracts, Webtoday design & information awards, yashke, and Hypernarritive.

PS. Posting jobs helps make a little money for COLOURlovers & our Non-Profit Charity Support, so find a talented creative person and share the COLOURlove.

Cheers,
-Darius

Darius A Monsef IV
Creator & Editor

One week ago tonight we were able to do what I've wanted to do for a long time now… We threw a big party and made a ton of love with color!

View the COLOURlovers Coup.0 Launch Party Photo Gallery

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It was a fantastic evening of palette making, colorful conversations and checking out the new website for COLOURlovers.com. With 6 sexy new iMac computers provided by MacForce we were able to have guests browsing the new site and getting some back-seat web surfing help from the people who built it.

We built 5 hanging spaces on one wall of Rake Art Gallery and had our guests making palettes from the 40+ 12" x 48" color canvas strips. Just like on the site, it was fun seeing what other people would come up with. Our good friends over at Clutch Camera were there to capture the palettes and their lovers for us to share.

It was interesting to see how creative people got as the night went on... The tasty beverages from Lange Winery and Widmer Brewing probably helped some shy lovers get up there and create their palettes. I think our party was scheduled from 7-9:30pm but we wrapped up closer to 11:30pm.

We also chose 5 palettes from the site to recreate at 36" x 60" pieces of art. It was inspiring to see the translation of the palette on the site to the physical world. We've now got some good ideas to remodel our bedroom (and a lot of left over paint!)

The large amount of canvas came from Utrecht and Art Media & the paint came from our neighbors at Miller Paint.

I want to thank all the COLOURlovers who showed up and helped make our launch of Coup.0 a huge success, especially those who traveled quite a distance to join us.

Also a big thanks goes out to:
Alexis Jonnson for food & wine pairing, catering.

My family for showing up and sharing in the COLOURlove.

And last, but most importantly... Sara Murphy for painting all the canvasses for the event, supporting me in putting on a very successful launch party and for being a wonderful part of my life.

Darius A Monsef IV
Editor & Creator

What's new?

I'm only half joking by using the Beta Logo Maker, because while the site is launching... there will continue to be new improvements, updates and features added regularly. So in order to prevent any discouraged people from thinking this is it and all our time and energy has been exhausted... COLOURlovers Coup.0 is in "beta."

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Most people will also notice a lot of "Web 2.0" like features on the site. With the new version of the site we're trying to make the CL site not just more fun to use, but also more informative, useful and inspiring.

It is quite a big change from the previous version so I created a little tour to help any returning lovers get acclimated, or a if you're new to loving colors with us... take the tour and get it on!

A little lift here... A little tuck there...

We gave the site a whole new design that opened up the content area allowing us a little more room to show the color love. When I first designed CL 2 years ago... I really had no idea it would grow to what it has become. For posterity's sake here is a screenshot of the actual first version of the COLOURlovers.com layout. (Also note the file is saved on my computer as Untitled1.psd.)

With a wider layout we have more room to move things around in an attempt to make the site more user friendly, and we have more room to add new sections and features.

Web 2.0h No!

CL only scored a 3.5 out of 6 on the Web 2.0 Cliches list by Stuart Brown, so you could say we didn't get to trend obsessed. What we tried to do was take some of the good from the "2.0 Trend" and blend it with what COLOURlovers has always been about... Making Love with Colour.

Lover Profiles

More personal... if you want.

Blogs. LiveJournal, WordPress, TextPad... If you write it someplace else, you can show it here on CL. Add your blog feeds to your profiles and share your thoughts.

Pics. Flickr and More of it & Bigger. Now you have a profile page dedicated to your Flickr pics.

Replaced with About Non-Profit...

The Technology Behind the New Site

COLOURlovers is running custom PHP applications with a mySQL back-end. The new site is W3C CSS Validated, using Ajax & JS modules to make finding, loving and sharing easier. The site is running on a (dv) Dedicated Virtual Server from MediaTemple. The forum is powered by vBulletin and stats are being tracked with Mint.

Several very talented people were a part of taking my vision for CL Coup.0 and making it happen. A large thank you is deserved by all the people who have been loving colors for the last two years and who have taken the time to provide feedback on the site. A big love goes out to:
Jay McLellan - User Interface Design
Chris Williams - Programming.

Information LOVERLOAD

New Interviews & Articles
There are two new articles from very talented individuals up on the site and we're planning on adding new ones regularly.

Trends
We're just getting started! Right now you can et a taste of the many great color trending tools to come, but visiting the Color Cover Models section to see what magazines are using what colors on their covers.

Cover Models
The Color Cover Models is the first of many great color trending tools to come in the near future. It isn't an exact science, but it is meant to give you an idea of color usage in the real world.

With the Good... Comes the Bugs...

The love notes (private messaging system is not running right now. We're going to be replacing the old system and integrating the love notes with the private messaging system in vBulletin. *The forum isn't up yet either.)

If you notice any bugs, or have any comments you'd like to share... Please drop me a note.

Cheers,
-CL

When you're introducing the next generation of television, you want to make an impact - but that doesn't mean you have to be predictable. To announce the arrival of the new BRAVIA LCD and SXRD range, we want to get across a simple message - that the colour you'll see on these screens will be 'like no other'.

Our latest TV ad - featuring massive paint explosions - took 10 days and 250 people to film. Huge quantities of paint were needed to accomplish this, which had to be delivered in 1 tonne trucks and mixed on-site by 20 people.

The effect was stunning, but afterwards a major clean-up operation was required to clear away all that paint!

Continue Reading and See the Video at Sony BRAVIA

ColorZilla is an extension for Mozilla Firefox and the Mozilla Suite.

It assists web developers and graphic designers with color related tasks - both basic and advanced.

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With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program or site, like COLOURlover.com. You can Zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes.

Continue Reading at ColorZilla