I was working on a new site design with Mary this past weekend, when we started to play around with colors for the layout.
I showed her a website that Adobe created that allows you to create color palettes with up to five colors and see how they interact with each other. The site is called Kuler (get it?? color spelled funny) and is supremely useful. You can create your own combinations or just browse the site for inspiration.

Another site that I love to browse for color inspiration (but have yet to use their palette creation capabilities) is ColourLovers.

“What tools are you using that have little to no cost? What does and doesn’t work?”

Emily Barton
Michigan State University Libraries

Have you checked out Del.icio.us yet?

If you’re late to the game as I am, let me clue you in…

Del.icio.us is a “social bookmarking” site, which basically means that you have an online repository for all your bookmarks, with the ability to see who else has the same site saved as you, and also to browse their entire bookmark catalog.

The benefit of this might not be immediately apparent, but this is a great source of inspiration. Say you have a weird page of avant-garde Russian constructivist propaganda posters bookmarked that you stumbled upon a year ago. You can instantly see that 62 other people have the same site bookmarked. Most likely than not, the people have this site bookmarked have some of the same interests as you, so take a minute and browse their bookmarks, you might discover something new and right up your alley.

Even if you don’t take advantage of the “social” aspect of del.icio.us, you’ll have a browser independent list of all of your important bookmarks.

Check out my del.icio.us if you want to try it out before you sign up. (It’s free to sign up by the way.)