By way of Tak I discovered the Colour Lovers website today, which is well worth a look.

It has a couple of great features and some aspects that are slightly baffling.
The whole idea of submitting colours and then allowing users to vote for them, comment on them and so on is completely hatstand. Aside from the fact that submitting a colour isn’t a case of creating anything, but simply of picking something from a list, and the complete incomprehensibility of the fact that colours have ratings (for instance white, #FFFFFF, has a rating of 4.5 out of 5, I’ve no idea what we should read into that); the site only covers the RGB colour space (how do you take it seriously with no HSL or CMYK?) so there’s a finite 16.7 million colours to play with. You might notice that the site displays the number of colours being shared: 485,194 at the time of writing, and whilst this might well be a count of colour names given rather than individual colour values used, you do wonder how long it’ll be before the gamut’s been posted, voted on, and all we’ve worked out is that people like orange better than a very slightly darker orange, and that a lot of people have wasted a bunch of time telling everyone that they like a colour. Whoop-de-doo. “Banal” hardly seems to cover it.

So, what of the more interesting things? Palettes, then. One cute feature on the palette creation page derives a palette from an image. It’s something you can do by hand, but a tool to do it is a great idea. I tried it with this photo, which has a nice combination of sand and blue in it, but the tool completely failed to pick up the blue, which was disappointing. Nevertheless, I still think it’s a fairly useful tool if you’re careful which colours to select, and certainly has application for websites which carry an image in the page template.

One point to think about, though, is that the palette sharing could raise some interesting issues. If you browse the site, find a palette and use it on a website, for instance, that could technically be copyright theft. Do you have copyright in a palette just by submitting that combination of colours to a site? I have no idea, but it’s not impossible.

Oh, and finally, despite the clean and generally user-friendly look and feel of the site, I have to congratulate the site authors on managing to implement one of the worst (and there’s some seriously stiff competition for this) cascading Javascript menus I’ve ever seen. Chapeau! You might like to try it for yourself: go and click on “Trends” and see how it magically moves away from your cursor. Then once you’ve moved the cursor to the new position of “Trends,” move in a straight line to “Magazine Trends” in the submenu, and enjoy how it’s replaced by a different submenu before you get there. Happy days! Everyone loves a user interface which moves itself around as you move the cursor across it.

Hm. I seem to have started out recommending it and ended up slating it. Oh well.