benlowery

Exploring Colors

Jul 5 2008. 1 comment.
Gettysburg

A huge part of design is picking colors. One thing I’ve never been particularly good at is choosing a color palette. Thankfully, there are sites out there that do nothing but catalog and explore color palettes, and I thought I’d share my two favorites.

The first is Kuler from Adobe. It’s a Flash-based application that lets you build, share, search for and browse color palettes, all submitted by other users. It also has some really fun features, like pulling a color palette from a photo on Flickr (my favorite photo sharing site) and easy export into the various Adobe design apps, like Photoshop and Illustrator. The color palette at the top of this post is the highest ranked from the last 30 days.

My other favorite is a site and blog called Colour Lovers. The blog is fantastic and a great way to broaden your exposure to palettes and get a sense for where these things come from. It’s in my list of daily reads on Bloglines and I highly recommend following it if you’re interested in color (or colour).

Firefox3 is out!

Jun 17 2008. no comments.
Firefox 3

Point your browsers over to getfirefox.com and download the best version of the best cross-platform browser yet. I’ve been using the alphas and betas and release candidates for a while and I think this will be a great release. Between the performance and typographic rendering improvements, I just can’t stand using Firefox2 any more.

Mapping the Front

May 9 2008. no comments.
mappingthefront

If you’re not familiar with it, the Western Front was a major line of battle between France and Germany during World War I. It was effectively a stalemate, with the line never moving much during the duration of the war, but a huge number of people died along it.

Mandy sent me a link to some amazing maps with various bits of data from the War. The one shown above is a segment of a map overlaying exhumed bodies on top of what’s a mostly standard map.

It’s a sad display, but a wonderful expression of multi-variate data display. Tufte would be proud I think.

Painting with rainbows

Apr 24 2008. no comments.

Crayons

Wow. All 120 colors of Crayola crayons, with hex codes. Awesome.

An Affair to Remember

Apr 15 2008. no comments.

Damn that’s a pretty font. From an interview with Neil Summerour over on I Love Typography.