There’s a sense in which collecting monumentous amounts of cool interactive design tools is not dissimilar to hoarding favourite clothes that no longer fit or long held but chipped platters and glasses or in our case, unusual antique chairs we find at industrial auctions. You know you don’t really need them, you rarely use them but let’s face it, there’s something particularly reassuring just knowing you have them. I feel the same with design tools, and any online tool for that matter. But still I persist.

Having presented Adobe’s Kuler a nifty online tool, I then felt compelled to search out what other tools are available online to get the colour juices going. I found two.

The first one is COLOURlovers which is an international community of designers and artists of all kinds who visit the site to get color inspiration, ideas and feedback for both their professional and personal projects. COLOURlovers’ loyal members create colors, palettes and patterns to nurture their ongoing love affair with color. They join color-inspired groups and forums and share the love by commenting on their favorite creations. The COLOURlovers blog fuels the world’s online discussion of color with its entertaining posts on color trends and news, including interviews. These people love colour a lot. You can check it out here

The second one is ColorSchemer Studio which is a professional color matching application for anyone from hobbyists to advanced professionals. It  work with a dynamic visual color wheel, instantly explores harmony relationships and even intelligently suggest color schemes for you! It looks like it does a lot of stuff but presents significantly less love than the previous program. And you can check out this one here

And for those of you on mac, there is always the handy digital colour meter  conveniently found in Applications > Utilities > digital colour meter. It works in both RGB and CMYK and lets you nominate and identify exact colours on screen. So whack those in your toolbar and enjoy.