One new feature of Adobe Illustrator CS3 that is fast becoming this designer’s favorite tchachke is the Color Guide palette. For those of you who haven’t checked out adobe’s Kuler (kuler.adobe.com) Color Guide is an in-app short utility palette to help you create and explore color combinations. Having trouble with finding the right contrast for text against a background? Check out the Color Guide palette. It will give you a choice of color patterns, like complementary, tints, shades, Warm/cool, Vivid/muted, harmony and disparity. All these variations can be saved as swatches, or just applied directly to your elements. You can save as Coor Groups, edit them, explore them and finally use combinations that are classic, or completely unexpected.

This is a great boon, and a great insight on the part of Adobe’s development team. For those of you not yet on the CS3 platform, check out Kuler (http://kuler.adobe.com). Although I’m not sure how we’re supposed to pronounce the name, something between Kool and Kull, I suppose, this site from Adobe is another great way of developing color harmony and color groups for your designs. Make sure to take the test demo. You can save your colors directly to Illustrator, as well as share them with others on the site. So whether it’s “cooler” or “culler” it’s cool.