As a designer one of my constant struggles is finding the right color combinations for any project. Me and ROY G. BIV have a love hate relationship. Let’s face it without color our world would be far less interesting place. But with all the color we have at our fingertips, choosing one can be an overwhelming and daunting task. However Adobe Kuler just announced some great new features that will make it even easier to create & use custom color themes.
Kuler has always been a great source of color inspiration with features that include an interactive color wheel, theme sharing, theme search & exploration, color editing and tagging & commenting. Now with the introduction of Adobe CC designers will have even more features to look forward to. The good news these features will be available in June so you don’t have to wait in anticipation that much longer.
So what are these new features?
Adobe Kuler iPhone App. How many times have you been walking and see a really cool poster or an unbelievable sunset and you think that those colors would be perfect for a design project you are working on. Now with this phone app you can actually choose the camera setting and it will pull colors and create a custom theme for you from whatever you choose to take an image of. Are your socks knocked off yet? Well another great feature is you can actually choose the live setting and while you move your camera around the app will automatically create color themes. You can also move the color dots within your images to have even more control over the theme created. You still have 100% control over the colors once a theme is created. What do you do once you have created a theme and you want to use it on one of your design projects?
Well that brings us to the next great feature: Color Sync.
Once you have created a theme you can choose Color Sync and it will automatically be uploaded to your project in Illustrator. I’ll give you a second for the sheer awesomeness of this to sink in. So you can be walking and see a colorful piece of graffiti, take a picture, create a theme and then BOOM uploaded in your current project. You may be asking yourself well that’s cool and all but how can I use it for my professional projects.
Here are some great ways I think the Adobe Kuler will help designers & their clients:
- A client presents you with a T-shirt of a swatch of clothing that needs to be incorporated into the logo
- Take images from the companies business or products to create a theme
- Instantly create theme from any inspiration images they provide
- Use nature to create “eco-friendly” themes
- Be able to your client an instant update or change in color based on newly created themes
and many, MANY MORE!
To see these new features in use check out the official video by Adobe:
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/creative-cloud-for-design/introducing-the-adobe-kuler-iphone-app/
