Kuler is a new piece of software from Adobe. It allows you to create colour themes or view ones that have already been created by the Kuler community.
It is free to use online and can also be integrated into your usual Adobe design software (Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Firework and Flash). Kuler is also available for download as a desktop application and runs using Adobe Air.
It’s a great way for people who aren’t as design oriented like myself to get a great looking colour scheme going. Once you have created your theme, you can save it for later use.
How does it work?
It works around a five colour theme where there is a base colour and four related colours. nce you have selected the base colour, you can choose how the other four are picked from the six ‘colour harmony rules’. You can also select custome colours where you just drag the pins around the colourwheel youself.
You can re-order the colours by dragging them around in a shuffling kind of way. There is also the option to select the hex values of the colours so you can use them in other programs etc. Or you can paste hex values in yourself and create a theme from one of those.
Basically any way you can think of creating a theme of colours, Adobe have thought of it in Kuler. There’s sliders, RGB values, hex values, CMYK and more. It’s all there.
Once you’ve created the theme, you can save it for later or publish it for everyone in the community to see.
Them’s the rules…
Adobe Kuler uses 6 colour rules that are taken from colour theory, these are: Analogous, Monochromatic, Triad, Complementary, Compound, and Shades. Selecting your base colour and then clicking one of these rules quickly creates a complimentary theme of some variety.
Creating themes from images
Kuler allows you to upload images or even select images from Flickr to create themes. Here you can create them using ‘Moods’. The Moods available for use are: Colorful, Bright, Muted, Deep, Dark, and Custom. These pick colours from the image that you have selected or uploaded.
Community Service
Adobe seem to be creating a great community here whereby you can login with your Adobe ID, share your themes, download themes, comment on themes, rate other peoples themes and search the masses of themes already on there.
Adobe Kuler can be found here: http://kuler.adobe.com/