What colors look good together? Designers have a good answer to this. (“Black goes with everything.”) But I haven’t had good answers… until I found Kuler at Adobe Labs. The kuler engine is… well, it’s cool. You can quickly find groups of colors that other folks have made, or enter your own color and find corresponding colors.
For example, here I’ve created a color swatch in InDesign. There’s no automatic way to tell kuler about this color, so I just write down the CMYK values.
Next, I go to kuler.adobe.com and sign in. (If you don’t already have an Adobe account, you can sign up. It’s free and easy. You need to sign in to see color details, mix your own colors, or download color swatches.) I can now type those values in to the Flash-based kuler interface. You should adjust the swatch titled “Base Color.”
Now the magic happens: You can find corresponding colors by first clicking on something from the “From a Rule” options. Here, I’ve chosen “Analogous.” You can adjust the “base color” interactively by dragging the circle that is highlighted in the color wheel.
Once you find a group of colors you like, give it a name and description and press the Save button. Kuler will then offer you the option to download the group of colors to your hard disk as an Adobe Swatch Exchange (.ase) file. From there, it’s easy to get into InDesign: Choose Load Swatches from the Swatches palette menu.
Of course, there’s a basic problem: The Web is not color managed, but InDesign is. So don’t plan on trusting what you see on screen… or at least take it with a large grain of salt.
Kuler has lots of other options. For example, you can share your swatch groups with everyone else by publishing it. Then people can rate it and others can download them. Go explore, then tell us below what you think.
This article was last modified on December 18, 2021
This article was first published on February 1, 2007
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