Design inspiration can come from a lot of different places. If you find yours from digital sources on the web, Palette Grabber for Firefox might be incredibly useful to you.
Install it, and Palette Grabber sits in the left corner of your status bar waiting to leap into action. A single click (right or left) exports a selective palette based on your current page in Firefox. Palette selection is very intelligent, producing accurate swatch sets for each of the websites I sampled.
Palette Grabber supports several file formats, including Photoshop, Flash, Fireworks, PaintShop Pro, the GIMP, and Mac OS X Color Picker. Minimalists and power users can elect to save a tabbed text listing of RGB values.
For a 25k download, Palette Grabber is definitely worth adding to your Firefox install if you do any digital design work.
If you're in the business of pirating colors from websites, then mooColorFinder is here to help you. Just type in a web address (say, your favorite blog) and mooColorFinder will return the colors used on that website. The colors are display as little tiles of color; which you can then mouse over to get the hex color.
Now, we should note that this web service doesn't seem to always work correctly on certain websites. We believe it has to do with the way in which the site was coded.
If you prefer desktop applications to web apps, you could always use DigitalColor Meter.app (Mac; found in /Applications/Utilities/) or Instant Eyedropper for Windows.
If you love Ubuntu Linux, but you're not so fond of its default brown theme, there's hope. You can find an assortment of alternate themes in the System->Preferences->Appearance menu. The themes will change the colors of your program toolbars.
But if you're looking for something slightly more comprehensive, you might wan to check out Blubuntu. It's a theme that gives Ubuntu a nice calm blue color scheme. It also comes with a suggested wallpaper.
You can install Blubuntu by opening a terminal window and typing "sudo apt-get install blubuntu-look." Once installed, you should find Blubuntu listed in your Appearance menu. In order to apply Blubuntu to your login screen, go to System->Administration->Login Window, and select Blubuntu from the "local" tab.
Have you ever wished you could easily figure out the HTML or RGB values for a specific color? Instant Eyedropper is a free Windows utility that will show you the HTML, RGB, Hex, or HSB codes that correspond with pretty much any color on your screen.
Once Instant Eyedropper is running, all you have to do is click on the icon in your system tray and keep your mouse button down as you drag your cursor to a spot on your screen. The program will display the color code whether you're hovering over an image, web page, or pretty much anything else. Note that it doesn't appear to work with videos, but seriously what were you trying to use it on a video for anyway?
Instant Eyedropper will also automatically copy the color code to your clipboard, so you can paste it into your image editor or web design application.
Well, the sixteen hexadecimal digits are just numbers when it comes right down to it. And you can do all sorts of things with numbers, like use them as a basis for web-colors and make them into a pretty picture that may or may not be illegal to share with your friends.
But why stop there when you can go one step further and design a T-shirt based on those colors and sell it for fun and profit? It'll be interesting to see if the T-shirt gets a cease and desist notice from the MPAA, or if they'll send out letters to anyone caught wearing the shirt in public.
Here's an ingenious way to create a palette of colors that work well together for your next design project - Color Palette Generator. Simply supply the site with an image that contains colors you enjoy, and it will select a set of colors from the image that are complimentary to one another, and match the image's colors. As stated on the site, this can be useful for design projects that rely on a central image, but I can imagine it could also be a good way to choose colors for offline endeavors as well. Maybe you can match your wall color to a color from your favorite painting or rug. Imagine the possibilities.
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.
