Adobe Releases kuler, A Web Application For Building Color Themes

kuler allows designers to build groups of colors quickly and easily, and it’s web-based.

Today Adobe introduced a technology preview of kuler, a Web-hosted application that allows users to quickly create and share harmonious color themes over the Web. I first heard about it from Adobe’s PR team yesterday, and John Nack has written a bit about it on his blog here.

The interface is pretty intuitive, though it’s been sluggish lately—it seems there’s some performance issues with the web application, though they’re certainly being worked on. kuler enables users to tag, comment on and share themes with other designers, and then save their color themes as Adobe Swatch Exchange files (.ASE) for use in CS2 applications such as Photoshop CS2, Illustrator CS2 and InDesign CS2. kuler continues Adobe’s recent trend of using white-on-black and white-on-gray color schemes for their interfaces; see Photoshop Lightroom and Acrobat 8 to see what I mean.

Click to see the full-size screenshot.

kuler uses Flash Player 9 and ActionScript 3, so you will want to upgrade your browser’s plug-in before taking a spin. I’ve worked with it a little and it seems fun and easy to use; I created a five-color palette very quickly. Basically, you create a color (sliders can be configured for RGB, CMYK, HSV, LAB or HEX input) and then generate four more colors based on rules (analogous, monochromatic, triad, complementary, etc.) or tweak them with the sliders. kuler does a fine job of controlling the whole palette based on individual modifications—change one color and the others change according to the specified rule. I think kuler will be a fine addition to a designer’s toolbox.

And by the way, “kuler” seems to be actually written with a lowercase “k”.