ColourLovers

Last week I had a last minute big project for a client that focused on color. I have Pantone color swatches, but I needed to find a way to create color palettes I could present to them digitally. So I Googled Digital Color Palettes and I stumbled onto a website called ColourLovers. Talk about love at first site! WOW! Website creator Darius A Monsef IV developed this intuitive and addictive website after being bored senseless by a class in color theory while studying fashion design. Darius knew there had to be a better way to explore color, so he came up with ColourLovers. It's a website where you can create your own color palettes and patterns, then you can apply your palettes to the patterns and also draw from millions of palettes and patterns created by other users. They've got a feature that allows you to print your patterns into fabrics via Spoonflower and to apply the patterns to a variety of objects. You even get to name your own colors when you select a shade no one else has chosen. I found my solution.

The website also has a program called Themeleon that allows you to apply your pattern to your Twitter background. I did mine on Friday! You can upload images to the PHOTOCOPA application and get color palettes from photos! Finally there is a more advanced color palette tool called COPASO that you can explore once you've played with the basic palette generator.

I was so excited, I emailed Darius and asked him to speak to you about this website and what inspired him to create it. Darius was kind enough to answer a few questions for me.

How did you come up with this idea?

My background is in web development / design. But 5 years ago I went back to school to study my hobby interest: Fashion. While in art school they made me take a color theory course that was painfully boring. We spent several weeks just mixing paint and creating chromatic strips of color... I thought there was so much more to color than just how to mix different shades of it with paint.

Our eyes all see light differently... We all have different cultural and personal reactions to color... It is something that is literally in everything.

So, on a long weekend I built COLOURlovers as a place to name and share color swatches. It was a play on HotorNot, which is a rate this person's photo as "hot" or not. I wanted to see if people had similar reactions to colors as they might to a blonde or brunette. Turns out my designer/creative friends liked the idea and wanted some additional features. I added the ability to make palettes and it's grown organically ever since.

What has the reaction been so far?

Well, 300,000+ people have signed up. More than 1 million people come by each month. We've been nominated as Best Community in the Webby Awards the past 4 years in a row. More then 2.5 million colors have been named and 1 Million palettes created and shared. And we're still growing...

Where do you envision this going?

I recently partnered up with a long time friend and Competitor, Aaron Epstein of www.ColorSchemer.com. We've both been in the color space for several years now, but focused on different areas. We've built the best community around color we could and he built amazing
professional color software.

The partnership gave birth to www.CHROMAom.com our new parent company for COLOURlovers, ColorSchemer and our new products and services. Our mission is to bring color enlightenment to the world. We'll keep working on COLOURlovers as the best creative community and resource, developing our professional ColorSchemer apps... and building a new
global color authority.