Cool colours

If there's one thing as a designer I love more than typography (geeky, I know), it's colour!

One of my secret weapons in the sourcing of new colour combinations for my clients is Adobe Color.

I have been using the Adobe Color (formerly Kuler) website for years and now Adobe has an iPhone app that will helps capture and share any shade of the rainbow.

As with the website, you can try out, create, share and save various colour schemes, each of which consists of a set of five colours using a series of slides and colour wheels.

You can use it for creating new hues in one of seven colour rules analogous by default, but monochromatic, complementary, and others are also available.

The website is fun and handy, where you can create your own or scroll through heaps of colour combinations submitted by other designers, but the app has an extra powerful tool. It allows designers to build and edit colour themes based on photos taken with their iPhone.

While aiming the iPhone, five on-screen dots continually sample colors from any objects within its field of view, displaying them as a theme. Tapping the screen freezes the current theme so it's not lost during capture.

Thanks to Adobe Color, capturing any colour of the rainbow is not just fun, but also free, and it's sure to become a valued mobile tool for creative designers everywhere, and for anyone who loves playing with colours. Adobe Color is exceptionally cool! (or should that be 'kule'?) See color.adobe.com/explore