Adobe Kuler at the Quilt Show

This weekend, I attended the “World’s Largest Outdoor Quilt Show” in Sisters, Oregon. Anticipating your rolled eyes, all I can say is that, if you’ve never seen 1400 quilts hanging from the sides of buildings, hanging from the rafters, even hanging from trees, your life is incomplete.

All of which is well and good, but how do quilts relate to web design and development?

Well, if you’re like me, one of your biggest challenges as a designer/developer is the near constant need to create attractive and original color palettes for new websites.

Inspiration #1

Somewhere, along about the 500th quilt, it dawned on me: I was surrounded by 1400 color palettes. Not all of them would make attractive websites (or quilts for that matter) but many would and, of those, many were combinations I would never dream up on my own.

So, inspiration being where you find it, I pulled out my iPhone and started snapping pictures with plans to use them later to create my own palettes.

Inspiration #2

At about quilt 750, I remembered I had recently downloaded the latest version of Adobe’s Kuler app, which can use the iPhone’s camera to pull “themes” (Kuler-speak for color palettes) from the environment. I’d played with an earlier version of Kuler and found it fun but not worth adding to my workflow. After playing briefly with the updated app, my opinion hadn’t changed: a cool toy but not really a productivity tool.

Now, surrounded by hundreds of quilts, I decided to give it another try.

Kuler isn’t immediately intuitive

So I fired up the app, pointed it at a quilt and watched a bunch of “dots” roam around the live preview image creating themes. When I saw a theme I liked, I clicked the checkmark icon at the bottom of the screen and captured it – COOL! – or captured a different theme that had formed right before I clicked – not nearly as cool.

But it’s not that tough to figure out.

I realized pretty quickly I could benefit from a quick tutorial but I wasn’t going to take the time for that in the middle of a quilt show so I did what I usually do. I started pressing buttons and swiping screens trying to figure things out on the fly.

I’m pretty sure I could still benefit from a tutorial (and, if you find a good one let me know) but here’s a quick rundown of what I discovered on my own.

1. You can temporarily freeze the preview and the theme by tapping on the screen (unfreeze by tapping again).
2. With the screen frozen, you can edit individual colors in the theme by dragging the “dots” around the screen.
3. Kuler has a camera mode, that (surprise) let’s you take photos and pull themes from them rather than working with the live preview.
4. Camera mode can store pictures in your iPhone Photo Library AND access non-Kuler photos from the library, Google and Flicker.
5. In theme view, you can tap on a theme to bring up edit buttons to:
   • Edit the theme.
   • Change the theme title and add informational tags.
   • Make the theme public and share it via Twitter or email.
   • Delete the theme.
6. In theme view, switching to landscape brings up full screen theme previews you can swipe through. Switch back to portrait to return to theme view.

And it’s integrated with Illustrator CC

When I got back home, I fired up Illustrator CC, my tool of choice for design “sketches.” I knew Adobe had integrated Kuler into Illustrator, so I was looking forward to importing my themes and playing with them. To my surprise, it wasn’t necessary. My themes had already synched with Illustrator via Creative Cloud and were waiting for me in the Kuler palette (which I eventually discovered via the Windows>Extensions>Kuler menu item).

This kind of integration between applications is one of the great promises of Creative Cloud. It’s a small feature (and not yet available in other CC apps although Adobe says it’s coming) but it’s a promising start.

Conclusion

In spite of my tech orientation, I was a latecomer to the mobile revolution and, to be honest, I haven’t found many apps that actually increase my productivity. It looks like Kuler may be one that does. It fits my idea of what a great mobile app should be:

• Small and focused
• Easy to use
• Well integrated with other applications

I’m looking forward to exploring Kuler in more depth and implementing my quilt themes into future web products.

In the mean time, I think Kuler and I might make a visit to a local gallery.