As a designer you're often faced with the task of creating a web or print layout that requires a harmonious or complimentary color combination. For most of us, choosing those right color combinations can be somewhat of a challenge- this is where Adobe® kuler steps in!

So what is kuler and what does it do? kuler is actually a web application that is hosted on Adobe's site that anyone can access for free. It's a tool that allows designers to choose any color on the color wheel and kuler will automatically suggest color combinations that are either analogous, monochromatic, triad, complementary, compound or simply shades of your base color. You can also create completely custom combinations for your liking.

Why is it so important to choose the right colors? Well, it's a psychological thing even if we're not conscience of it. Have you every noticed that most toys for babies are usually the primary colors (red, blue, yellow)? That's because babies respond better to these colors than more muted tones. Of course, as a designer you always have to think about what colors are appropriate for your audience from a marketing standpoint. For instance, most hospitals use blues, greens (both soothing colors) and grays for their publications. Funeral homes use even more muted tones usually of brown or beige. Obviously, you would want to use red (passion, danger) , yellow (happy, carefree) or orange (playfulness, joy) for such establishments minimally, even if those are your favorite colors. There's a wealth of information online about psychology and color - just Google "psychology of color" and you'll find plenty of useful articles.

Using Kuler with Adobe CS3 (Illustrator)

To use Kuler with Illustrator you can either browse to Kuler's web site http://kuler.adobe.com/ or access it through a Flash panel shipped with Adobe Illustrator CS3. Go to Window > Adobe Labs > kuler.

A panel will appear, similar to the one below, with several up-to-date color combinations found on Kuler's web site. You can browse through the Highest Rated, Most Popular or Newest themes inside of Illustrator by using this panel. You can also upload Swatches saved in Illustrator to kuler and subscribe to rss feeds.

Creating Custom Color Combinations

kuler also allows you to create your own color combinations and save them in your own Mykuler profile. You also have the option of publishing them for others to use.

In my example, I wanted to create a color theme for a fictional "sea critters" publication. I first started off picking a aqua marine blue/green color for my base and then tried out different color schemes. Either Monochromatic or Shades seemed to do the trick. I then named and saved my theme.

Now the part that really makes kuler so powerful is that I can now download my creation, which is saved as an ASE (Adobe Swatch Exchange) file and load it directly into Illustrator's Swatches Panel. To load the them into Illustrator, from your swatches panel, click on Other Library from Open Swatch Library (see below) and browse to wherever you saved the file to on your computer. The theme will automatically open up in its own panel.

My "Age of Aquarium" theme in Illustrator CS3.

I can now choose from any of these swatches to create my publication! I probably would have had a hard time choosing all these colors the old fashioned way - by myself, however, kuler made it a snap! It doesn't get much kuler than that! (I couldn't resist, that's so awful...)

kuler also works with Photoshop and InDesign both CS2 and CS3 versions. To find out more or to use kuler go to: http://kuler.adobe.com/