COLOURlovers is really a blog about color and design.

Look what it has available for members (free sign up):
Forums- discussions about all things color including use in pop magazines, fashion & designs.
Palettes - a simple tool and grea beta for creating palettes of color online
Patterns - a nifty tool for creating repeating color patterns from user created palettes.
Colors - two tools, one tool for selecting/searching for colors and another for trying variations of the hues.
Lovers - social networking for COLOURlovers members.
Blog - stories and articles about all aspects of color.
Trends - news and RSS reports on whats happeing in the Design and color worlds
Groups - part of the social networking tools.
Store - where to buy various COLOURlovers goodies.
Sponsors - who is who in sponsoring this site.
This is rich set of venues for artists, designers and just plain color fans to sample/explore "The Hues" with one another while getting useful ideas and insights as well. It is truly a color-full place to be to find likeminded designers and color enthusiasts. The forum is geared for exchanging color ideas while the blog has articles and stories which I found fascinating about color in design contexts and media. In sum, COLOURlovers is choc full of color fun and ideas.

Now for a site dedicated to color enthusiasts one would expect the color tools to be topnotch and COLOURlovers does not disappoint, delivering two color tools. First, there is a simple, but smooth color chooser tool with sliders for hue, saturation and luminance. Seen on the left it is easy to use and ties in well with the pattern making feature discussed in the next panel. I find that I can work quickly with this tool particularly when refining the color blends. It is very useful in achieving the right saturation and luminance especially for pastels or deep throated hues. It is worth noting that the chooser color allows users to look up other colors and palettes stored on the site to further stimulate and refine one's color ideas.

Perhaps less appreciated is the metadata one can store with each color created on COLOURlovers. This metadata information is then used in searches by other COLOURlovers members when searching for palette ideas. This data also is useful for your own classification and reminder purposes as well.
The second COLOURlovers tool is a full-powered ColorWheel on par with Color Wheel Pro or Color SchemeDesigner. These tools along with COLOURlovers COPASO colorwheel are top notch color tools with all the trimmings -> 7 popular modes of color palette selection including analogous, complementary, split complementary, triadic, tetradic modes of operation. Theses color wheels also have saturation and brightness control plus extensive customization. The COPASO colorwheel has a simple and easy to use design.

From the screenshot above one can see that the the COPASO wheel is fairly complete but it lacks help documentation. Also missing from the wheel is natural drag and drop oprerations, an loupe-like eye dropper tool so users can scavenge colors from other sites or images with magnified precision. Also it is difficult to magnify your color selections so users can see how the colors scale in size. COLOURlovers will have to wait to use the pattern maker tool to see their palette hues mixed together.
Despite these missing features, COLOURlovers still have a very productive color toolset. Making your color swatches is comparatively easy. And then COLOURlovers provides a variety of export options to popular paint programs like Photoshop and Illustrator.

To an extent the Pattern making tool can be thought of as the proof of the palette pudding. However, COLOURlovers does not have a swatch color mixing tool like in Corel's Painter; but its many preset patterns do give the opportunity to try out your hues in a variety of shapes and textures. Here is where drag and drop operations can be so effective. But of even more import would be the ability to magnify or enlarge the patterns. CoOLOURlovers does allow for a little of this on creation, but it still leaves a lot to be desired.

Scale is important in design. One thing one learns in photography is that great images scale up and down with a change of feeling and impact - but still retain an overall style or motif. Likewise some colors mix and scale up well - and some, to your surprise, emphatically do not. This is the missing test in an otherwise innovative and very useful pattern making/color testing tool.

There are two places on the COLOURlovers that I found a surpridse and a delight. First, the pattern making tool is just a wonderful way to test out your color combination. It really allows users to explore the colour interaction of their palette it sometimes frustrating (they don;t work as expected) but ultimately in illuminating ways. The second delight is the COLOURlovers blog. I found here articles on color trends that were really most helpful. Take the story on French-Belgian comics. AS a 50 year lover of comics, this was just a fascinating story as it filled in the gaps on what always had caught my attention - the powerful drawings and colour framing in Continental comic stories. And there are lts of sparkling nuggets like these.

In contrast the Forum is a bit too Flickr curt, cool and civil. Now this is a big improvement over the hurly burly of forums like Slashdot or Huffington Post where the commentary can become too heated and uncivil. I would like more exploratory commentary - "your cool, spring pastel hues work very well together but how do you indicate contrast or emphasis? Saturate which color or just darken the selected hue ?". Mind you - one can find nuggets like these in the COLOURlovers' forum - just be advised you will have to pan actively for sparkling commentary. As for the Lovers and Group social networking features, be forewarned that this reviewer is ultimately a utilitarian when it comes to color choice and design. So discount this old fart's viewpoint and you will find some pretty lively groups. Carpe diem.

COLOURlovers is a blog for designers who love the world of color. Yes it is also a social meeting place like Flickr or Fotki. Yes it has some serious competition from Adobe's Kuler color choice website. Yes it is missing a color picker/dropper tool to allow users to select colors from other images on their screen. Yes it is able to export color palettes to a variety of popular graphics softwareincluding Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, etc. But most important of all is the cornucopia of all things color available to its users. With elPaso moving in full time to Colors it will have two color choosing tools, one simple and efficient, the other a sumptuous color wheel of full capabilities. The matching of colorpalettes to patterns is really quite brilliant. The icing on cake here would be the ability to enlarge tha patterns .. but that may be a future enhancement. All things considered COLOURlovers is a wonderfully creative color tool chest.

Note on the Web page Design:The following Web page uses the Spry JavaScript framework from Adobe. It is the Accordion widget that has the advantage that it compresses a page down to one screen so users do not have to scroll down to get at all the content of a web page. The Accordion widget has the additional attraction that it provides a condensed summary of the article or review. The SpryAcoordion has 3 features of note. First, its HTML markup is simple and easy to follow. SEcond, it has auto-scrolling so if the content exceed ths height of the accordion, scrollbars are automatically inserted into the oversized accordion panel. Third, the Spry accordion works in Dreamweaver where it is equipped with visual layout, creative wizard and multiple accordions per page capabilities.