The Mill is an award-winning visual effects studio with offices in London and New York. It should go without saying that these guys know a thing or two about color. What's surprising, though, is that they're giving away a small chunk of that expertise for absolutely free in the form of an iPhone app. Mill Colour [iTunes link] can customize the colors of your photos using a bunch of tried-and-true preset effects, and it also has powerful manual color controls.

Even if you don't go beyond the prepackaged effects in Mill Colour, it's well worth checking out. I recommend the "bleached" and "noir" looks, especially. If you start to mess around with the manual side of Mill Colour, though, you'll quickly discover how powerful it is. You can fine-tune the saturation, gamma, gain and lift of each individual RGB channel, making sure your image looks precisely the way you want it to. Did I mention it's a free download?

ColorSuckr uses photos to generate color palettes you can use in your artwork and designs. You can choose from one of the photos on the main page, search Flickr, or input the URL of any webpage to find source material. ColorSuckr automatically finds the main photo on any Flickr page you enter.

There's also a bookmarklet that you can add to your browser's toolbar. Clicking it gives you a choice of any image on the current page. Once you've got an image, ColorSuckr will give you a draggable selection of colors, complete with hex, web safe and RGB info so you can get them exactly right in your designs. It's a unique way to get a good palette, and especially comes in handy if you're working on a layout that has to match a photo.

Neon Maze is a fresh take on maze games. The goal of the game is to reach the goal square with your spaceship, but to do so you need to navigate through a maze of variously colored neon barriers. The only way to pass through a barrier is to change your spaceship to the same color as the barrier, which can be done by passing over color pods spread throughout each level.

The puzzles are challenging, but not too challenging, and the way the spaceship moves when controlled with the mouse has a nice, springy quality, yet it responds in a very snappy fashion.

The game becomes more complicated once you advance to a certain point, and the neon bars become "locked". To open them, you need to have the key of the same color, which you can only get if your spaceship is that same color. If it sounds complicated, it can be, but it's also a good way of twisting things yet one more time to keep the challenge level up.

First they rolled out themes, now Google has decided to give us free reign over the look of our Gmail inbox.

That's right, you're no longer limited to Google's 31 pre-made themes - you can now fully customize your color scheme. The template allows you to choose colors via a panel of presets, or you can click the + symbol to access the full range of available colors. The preview updates instantly as you make your color choices.

Once you've got things set up the way you like them, just click save and close and your new design will be applied.

[ via Google Blogoscoped ]

If you work with colors on a Mac, you'll probably love Mondrianum. It combines the functionality of Adobe's popular color-theme creation community, Kuler, with the native color pickers of Mac OS X. When you open the color picker window in the apps you normally use -- everything from Textedit on up to Coda and Photoshop -- Mondrianum will be right there alongside the color wheel and the crayon picker.

Mondrianum lets you access Kuler themes right from the picker window, allowing you to choose an appropriate palette for the project you're working on. It integrates so seamlessly, it feels like it should have been there all along. If you checked out Mondrianum when it was still in version 1, your copy is about expire. Download version 2, which now works on both Tiger and Leopard, and responds to some changes in the Kuler API.

If you're tackling some graphic design project or maybe even your wall decor, getting color hints from ready made color templates from professional designers can be useful. Below are 10 of the better sites to help you out on your design challenge.


ColorCombos - nice color palettes to choose from. If there's a particular website whose colors you want to snag, check out their "Grab Website Colors" engine. You just input the URL of the site you're reviewing and ColorCombos extracts the palette for you.



COLOURlovers - this is pretty close to color mecca. This post should actually be filed as a Timewaster because you can spend hours checking out the various palettes and patterns and rolling your own. The site is full of features such as create your own palette from a URL you're inspired by, join groups devoted to colors (srsly), shore up on the latest color trends, contribute your own content and vote on others.


ColorExplorer - another site that's feature rich and full of color goodies. Color import from images, palette export to most programs, convert any number of colors into a matching palette, 1 click palette filters and adjustments, plus no requirement for site registration.


Kuler - not surprisingly, Adobe has a fetching web app to help you generate color schemes and if you have Adobe's Creative Suite 4, Kuler is built in. Kuler has great tools such as color extractor from an image, theme creation from 1 to several colors, as well as a community you can join and give and receive comments on yours and other's creations.


ColorJack - very nice color site featuring several apps such as Color Sphere which allows you to choose the right color scheme supporting 18 formulas and 9 color blindness simulations. There's also Color Galaxy, an online color visualizer with colors from 27 libraries including everyone's favorite forever and ever, Crayola.

Keep reading for more...

Google's Gmail has been slowly adding new features like IMAP and group chat. The latest addition has been a high priority for many organizational obsessed users since the email service's inception.

Gmail users can now assign separate colors for each label. This allows you to easily categorize emails and recognize them at a glance by thee label color. To get started editing labels, you can click the square to the right of your label list and a color palette will appear. Edit name if you wish and click OK.

We've tested colored labels using Internet Explorer, Safari 3 and Firefox 2 and all appear to work.

Are you a designer? developer? Like color? Want to do some cool things with Adobe's Kuler application? Now you can.

The Adobe Labs project Kuler, is a hosted color picker application that allows for inspiration, creativity and sharing, they now have an API for developers. This new Kuler API allows developers to request RSS feeds of the highest rated or most popular color themes, and incorporating them into web project and web sites.

Check out some Kuler API usage in the Showcase. Warning, most do require users to have Adobe AIR installed.

COLOURlovers is a social networking site designed for people who work with and love color. The site monitors color trends and gives users a place to get their color on by comparing different color palettes with other users, commenting on palettes, and readings articles and interviews about color.

The site is designed with creative professionals in mind who are working with color on a daily basis. Product designers, graphic artists, advertising professionals, or people who just want to look at pretty colors can search through different palettes on the site for inspiration and use keywords to filter through the system and find a color scheme that works well for their particular needs. the site also has some sample magazine covers and websites up so you can see a particular color scheme in action.

As far as social networking sites go this one is a pretty useful one. An inspired idea for people who may need a little inspiration.

[Via TechCrunch]

Windows Vista has soundly answered this unrequited need for beautiful and colorful Windows. The key word here is "customizable." To check out the customizable color options, visit your Vista control panel and click on Personalization (or right click your desktop and choose Personalization). This option used to be "Properties" when right-clicking on the Windows XP desktop, if you chose to block that out. You will see a bunch of new options you didn't have before to customize the look and feel of Windows.

The first option is Window Color and Appearance which will let you change the color of windows with a slider for light to dark blue for example. These options are just one of the things that make Vista a bit more flexible to use and a little more fun. Check out the gallery below for some nice shots of what you can expect to see in Vista's color options screen and the results.

Eight percent of all men suffer from some form of colorblindness, a condition that can interfere with their ability to distinguish things designed for unimpaired viewers. Color Oracle aims to change this by making it easy for designers to see their work as a colorblind person would. Color Oracle overlays the user's screen to simulate three different kinds of colorblindness of increasing severity, the idea being that by designing for the severely colorblind, all your bases will be covered.

It would be great to get some feedback on this app from actual colorblind readers– perhaps even colorblind designer Jon Hicks of Firefox fame?

[via Daring Fireball]

I'm not sure I've ever understood the web's obsession with color pickers, i.e. apps that help you build color schemes for whatever you're trying to design. Maybe that means I'm good at designing my own color schemes, or maybe it means that I'm really, really bad at it. At any rate, some of them are pretty cool, including kuler, a newish one from Adobe Labs. Characteristically, kuler is Flash-based and has a very slick interface. For creating color schemes you have a lot of help: there are analogous, monochromatic, triad, complementary, compound, shades, and custom modes, most of which are Greek to me but the little multiple-spoked color wheel is fun to play with. More interesting, though, is kuler's social aspect: If you create an account and log in you can save and share your color themes with other users, and rate the themes others have created. Though Flash interfaces aren't always my cup of tea, kuler is fun to use and great if you're looking for a little inspiration.

[Via Ned Batchelder]

Yotophoto is a search engine specifically for free-to-use images. Most of the images it indexes have been released under Creative Commons, GNU FDL, or similar licenses, and a smaller percentage are in the public domain. This means you can use any images indexed by Yotophoto without feeling subversive. And if you don't want to go to the trouble of visiting the Yotophoto web site, there's a search plug-in available for Firefox.

Now, are you ready for the really cool part? Yotophoto allows you to search by color. Need an image that matches your site's color scheme? Either use the Javascript color picker to choose from a palette of over 16 million colors, or enter a 6-digit hex code. Yotophoto will find images containing the color you specified. For example, here's a selection of images that match Yotophoto's logo.

del.icio.us is at it again, and this time they've added site thumbnails to the popular links on the homepage. Unfortunately, this is the only place thumbnails exist, but it's at least a step towards catching up to some of their competitors in this particular department.

Also making (another) appearance on the homepage is the re-introduction of popular tags, along with (from what I remember) some minor new UI elements as well. Bookmark counts are now in a more striking blue box, and I just noticed the tag cloud now uses red to denote tags that you share with everyone else (is this new or not?). Finally, on their blog they also hint at "lots of plans" for the recently updated del.icio.us API, but they offer nothing as hints towards whether it'll be a kitchen sink or a bookmarking A.I. that 'marks things for me based on my mood and past bookmarks. I guess we'll just have to wait (im)patiently.