Color is so important in any type of visual media, from illustration to graphic and web design. The colors that you choose for your project make a huge difference to the mood and feel of your work, and so it’s critical to get it right.

Kuler, a web application from Adobe gives you a great user interface to experiment with different color combinations, see what works, and find the color values for the colors that you’ve created.

Create Themes

Kuler makes it easy to create great looking color themes, and it gives you lots of different ways to do it. Starting your new theme is as simple as dragging a point around on the color wheel. As you adjust your pick in the wheel, the 5 swatches below will change colors in real time as you go, giving instant feedback.

For more precise color picking, you can drag color sliders around, with the options of HSV, RGB, CMYK, LAB, and even HEX values.

Kuler produces the four surrounding swatches to your base color based on a number of different color rules. These basically work by adjusting the color values of the other swatches by pre-determined amounts.

Rules are meant to be broken though and I’ve found that these rarely produce stunning results. That’s why there is a Custom rule, from which you can work manually to achieve perfection in your color combinations.

A couple of things that really bug me though … the color wheel seems to be somewhat on the small side. The other slight grievance is that when creating themes, you can’t view your swatches full screen until you have saved them.

The colour wheel could be slightly larger.

As a pretty neat bonus, you can also create color themes from an image which you can either upload yourself or find somewhere on Flickr.

I was skeptical of this at first, thinking the colors in images would never come out well but I’ve been surprised, and I’ve found that Kuler’s mood rules for images work impressively well.

Kuler's ability to pull a palette from an image is impressive.

One of the best features of Kuler in my opinion is the ability to download your themes (or anyone else’s) as an Adobe Swatch Exchange file (.ase). These are tiny files which import straight into Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign CS 2, 3, and 4.

Community

Much of the point to Kuler is to participate in the online community and check out what everyone else is creating. When you save your themes, you have the option of making it private, or public for the world to see.

In the ‘Themes’ section of the web app you are shown the latest ten new themes to have been made. More often than not, there will be some there that just make you want to cringe. Of course there will always be the odd one as well that inspires you. Clicking on the swatches enlarges them to fill the browser, engulfing you in the colors.

Kuler lets you rate these themes and even leave a comment if you feel the need. More usefully though, you can edit other peoples themes and save them again as your own.

Kuler also includes a Community section in which various artists and designers write a short article on how they use color in their works. It’s worth a quick read through some of these as they quite insightful.

Use the Community to be inspired and to learn from the pros.

Kuler Air

Kuler also comes in an Adobe Air desktop application for all operating systems, which I downloaded with the expectation that it would be a pretty useless gimmick. How wrong I was.

Kuler is an example of a good AIR app.

At first glance, Kuler Air appears to be a relatively simple app for just viewing different themes. But it does it well, plus a lot more.

You can view all of your themes, or browse themes by Highest Rated, Newest, Most Popular or Random. Much like the Web app you can search for any type of theme based on tags.

The Air app has it’s own strengths. Most importantly, importing your color themes into Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign becomes three times as quick and easy as the Web app; just click the application icon you want to import into, and Kuler will open it up as a new swatch in the app that you’ve picked.

Another handy feature is the ability to have the HEX values for a theme copied to the clipboard.

One very cool thing that the Air version does which the Web app doesn’t is the ability to ‘tear off’ color themes and scatter them around your desktop. These are scalable, and double clicking makes them fill the whole screen so you can really get a feel for how the colors work together with no other interference. Mousing over these tear-offs brings up all the controls you get from within the main window.

The AIR app adds some nice integration with your desktop.

You can see below how my desktop started to look soon after tearing off a few swatches. You’ll also notice the buttons for importing the color swatch into any of the main Adobe Creative Suite applications in the top middle of this shot.

Conclusion

Kuler is a very impressive web app which does a fantastic job of letting you create stunning color themes to use in your work, whatever it may be. These can be downloaded with ease as swatches to use right in your designs, and the Air app makes this even simpler. It may feel limited with only up to five swatches per theme but most of the time, less is more.

I’ve found Kuler to be a great app to keep bookmarked, and I see myself using this a lot more in the future. Let us know what you think of Kuler, or how you choose the color combinations for your work.