Color is the ultimate tool a designer has at his or her disposal to communicate feeling and mood. Cymbolism is a new website that attempts to quantify the association between colors and words, making it simple for designers to choose the best colors for the desired emotional effect.
Brand Tags is a site playing off the idea that whatever it is people say a brand is, is what it is. All tags are generated by people like you, so have at it.
For example, here’s what people are saying about Nike.
Been looking to brush up on your calligraphic skills or need a monogram for your bath towel set? Check out this amazing resource. Books with every kind of calligraphy, lettering, and Spencerian script at your fingertips. yum.
I love discovering automated design helpers on our BFF, the internet. Who doesn’t appreciate Stripe Generator and it’s quirky cousin, Tartan Maker? Here’s another to add to the list: Palette Generator! This might be the greatest thing since Vector Magic. Just upload a photo (or presumably any graphic file that inspires you) and in like 2 seconds you have a palette complete with hex values and inventive color names. Talk about voila!
It’s like the Joshua Davis trick, but automated (and less customizable). Of course, it’s not always the palette you are imagining, but it’s a nice start. Could come in handy if you’re considering dressing in palettes.
GOE is the new colour system launced by the PANTONE ®, available from the 1st October.
“With more than 2,000 new PANTONE Colors, the PANTONE Goe System is designed to inspire creativity and fulfill the requirements of a fast-changing, technologically advancing industry. PANTONE Goe is more than a single product with exciting new colors; the System includes modern tools and interactive software to drive collaboration and improve versatility in an increasingly global, multimedia environment.”
Moo is on to something. They dream up new tools that help people turn their virtual content into beautiful print products. Their printing service allows users to pull info and images from social networks like Flickr and Myspace to create highly customizable bcard and note designs.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/21/xcavatornet-visual-stock-photo-search/
Xcavator.net: Visual Stock Photo Search
Xcavator.net is a stock photo search portal based on visual search technology.
Xcavator.net provides natural and intuitive interactive search for stock photography providing buyers with a browsing experience based on both visual content and keywords. The key to the visual search capabilities is the portal’s color and image search engines, powered by CogniSign Intelligent Image Recognition Technology.
In laymen’s terms, Xcavator.net offers three types of interrelated search options. Tradition search delivers photos based on tagged keywords and is much the same as others in the stock photography market. Where Xcavator.net gets interesting is in color and image search. Xcavator.net allows color search matching, for example if a stock photograph was needed that matched a brochure or web site in terms of colors, users are able to refine the photo search to those colors by utilizing a color chart or by inserting the exact hexadecimal color into a box. Image search provides similar photos based on a user uploaded image or via a drag and drop of images found in an initial search.
Xcavator.net competes with other visual search sites including Riya, Pixsy and PicSearch. Xcavator isn’t necessarily better than any of their competitors, but different. The color and related search capabilities don’t have the same level of user enjoyment as Riya’s search features do, yet Xcavator.net’s features feel more practical and are definitely more finely targeted at niche stock photo search.
Xcavator.net recently signed a deal with iStockphoto that delivers 1.8 Million images from 38,000 contributors into the Xcavator.net search database. The site comes out of Beta on July 2.