*** From the Archives ***
This article is from October 12, 2012, and is no longer current.
Welcome Back, Kuler
Earlier this week I mentioned that Adobe’s Kuler site was down for maintenance, and speculated as to why that might be. The site’s back up now, and it turns out it to be a case of upgrading the site’s search capabilities. The new and improved search is billed as faster and more stable. A quick search in the Kuler panel inside InDesign CS6 seems to bear this out, with peppier performance than I’ve ever seen from Kuler before.
Also, the Kuler app (for Android only, sorry iOS users) has been updated to address issues with saving themes on the Kuler website.
If you do head over to the updated site, definitely check out the Community Pulse tool, which offers an interactive view of how people are using Kuler. The colors of downloaded themes are shown on a color wheel that you can click to see how popular a color is at any given moment.
And if you double click you can see related colors and copy the Hex values to your clipboard.
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For as long as Kuler still carries that funny but non-descriptive name and is still organized under the unexplainable “Extension” menu, it will never gain popularity. It should at least be offered in the Color section of the Windows menu.
Users really don’t care what kind of development or distribution technique is driving this standard feature, and as a brand name it is far too unknown to become something to search for in illogical places.
It’s like keeping your superb kitchen spices in an unclearly labeled box in your tool shed…