Color choice is important in design and there’s nothing novel about that concept. Knowledge of color theory and raw talent play a role. There are also a great number of tools available online to help anyone from a professional web designer to a amateur interior decorator learn how to make the right color choice.
Tools are fantastic, but which one?
What if you had an online community based around making color choices? Enter Kuler. Kuler is a web application launched by Adobe in November of 2006. It’s free to use and has several dynamic features for choosing the right color combination. One of the keys is that there is a whole community of users creating color palettes that are categorized by most popular, highest rated and newest.
Krazydad Colrpickr uses color to pull images from flickr. This gives you more than just colors – you get objects, textures and moods from images created by a community of photographers.
Inspiration, color theory and an interesting take on color in our world can be found at Colourlovers. The site has some great posts and a community of users creating rated color palettes.
There are many more color tools out there. One thing that you may have noticed about the three I have mention here are that they are, in some form or another, based on a community. This is vital to the usefulness of these tools; the power of the web prevails again.