Adobe kulers

Adobe's "kuler" site is a place to get ideas for colour themes (sets of five colours) and/or explore the world of colour by creating your own combinations.

You need to set up an account in order to get the colour information to use in a web or other documents. Once you sign-in, you can also create and save your own themes. The themes can be downloaded as swatches for use in Adobe products.

http://kuler.adobe.com

Webpage designers - COLOR helpers

A few fun pages to help you pick your colors for your website... The following plus a few more can be found on my website's Color Resources page.

Website Color Picker: "...will help you evaluate color combinations quickly and easily. It works equally well on MacOS or Windows. ...You can experiment with different colors for BGCOLOR, TEXT color, LINK color and VLINK color. ...click a color swatch in the appropriate section of the left window and see the color applied immediately to the chosen attribute in the right window."

Color Blender: Another visual color-code-producing site. This one lets you select 2 colors from color swatches, then blend the two in however many steps you specify. It's a Creative Commons share site, so you can copy the source code to have the Color Blender page handy on your own hard drive.

Color Schemer / Design in Harmony: My recent LVSOnline teacher says, "This is one of my favorites. You can use it on the web for free and you download any of the hundreds of color schemes posted there. The software available for purchase is really nice in terms of flexibility and power. It has a 15 day free trial."

CSS Type.com

Generate CSS code visually. Create a box of type using their online element selectors, including font, size, color, etc. See your selection results right on screen. Then click to generate the CSS code for it.

Web Developer - a Firefox Extension

This extention's author, Chris Pederick, says:

"The extension is highly configurable and contains many powerful features including CSS manipulation, multiple validation options and tools to display information about the current page."

The editor if Mozilla Update calls it

"an essential extension for any web developer/designer as it provides a raft of incredibly useful features all under one roof. You will wonder how you ever managed without it!"

Menus on the handy toolbar include CSS, Forms, Images, Information, Miscellaneous, Outline, Resize, Validation, View Source, Options. Bravenet's Webmaster Tips n Tricks Newsletter says,

"...a few of the developers tools that I have found most useful for basic website development. First and foremost is the Web Developer Toolbar. This is a fantastic toolbar that caters to the needs of developers. Each item (except ‘View Source’) has a drop down full of great things to do so there won’t be room to explain them all. You can resize your browser to different resolutions, outline different HTML elements in varying colors to locate problems in your code - there is a ton of great stuff in this toolbar."

Here's a direct link to the download page at the author's website (chrispederic.com)

Color Theory for the Color-Blind

An article from the Digital Web Magazine. Includes information on what color blindness is, and then explores how a color blind person can still be a good webpage designer.

"Being color-blind can be a real obstacle for anyone involved in design. For Web designers, this does not need to be true."

Color Theory

COLOR THEORY from the above WEB DESIGN & REFERENCE GUIDE: This is an excellent site that explains a lot of things you really should think about when selecting color for your website. The article covers Websafe Palette, color definitions, and includes several links to color resources.

Accelerated Learning Techniques

"Cercone Learning Internationa helps to provide tools to open the genius mind in each child or adult. The Cercone Learning Optilearning System utilizes color to promote and improve the learning process in all areas of life."

News University: FREE Courses

That's right, this online university offers free courses; all you have to do is become a registered user of their site/services. I'm very impressed with what they have to offer already, and they've only just begun!

NewsU is committed to providing interactive, inexpensive courses that appeal to journalists at all levels of experience and in all types of media. Officially launched in April 2005, NewsU offers an innovative approach to helping journalists enhance their skills.

From today's eLearning Guru newsletter:

Although NewsU.org is designed for professional journalists, I think many e-learning designers will find the free courses of value. They include courses on interview techniques, clear writing, color and design, use of photography, etc.

Here's just one example. The Writer's Workbench: 50 Tools You Can Use

This collection of writing tools will help you strengthen new work and diagnose stories you have already written. The self-directed course groups tools into four sections:

• nuts and bolts, including word choice and sentence structure;
• blueprints to create architecture for your stories;
• special effects to refine your writing voice;
• and useful habits to help you be a more confident writer.

Each tool features exercises to help you apply what you’ve learned. Use the tools to help build your skills or as reference to keep your writing sharp.