Online Tools review: Adobe Kuler

Colour. It is truly one of the most important aspects of visual design, and there are innumerable tools to help designers with the creation, evaluation, correction and selection of colour, yet once again, a new tool seems to have found a winning formula. This tool is Adobe's web-based application, Kuler.

Adobe touts Kuler as a web-hosted application for generating colour themes that can inspire any project. It allows designers to experiment quickly with colour variations and browse through thousands of themes created by the growing Kuler online community. What makes this application interesting, apart from the fantastic visual layout of the tool, are the powerful search capabilities, which allow a user to browse the growing database of existing themes by tags, by title, by creator or even by hex code!

Apart from the ability to browse other users creations, the easy-to-use tools in Kuler such as the colour wheel, harmony rules, and colour sliders allow the user to create their own themes which can then be shared with other Kuler users. It is also possible, using colour extraction tools, to create a colour theme from an uploaded image. This offers some fantastic possibilities for designers of all kinds!

Kuler requires the latest version of Flash to work, but it is a very slick application and a truly useful tool.