A bit off topic, but I hope this isn't true: Additionally, there won’t be any new colors years from now. The color spectrum of the future will be exactly the same as it is today. It’s neat to think we already have access to the color palettes of the year 3000. The usual sRGB colorspace used by most of the web is a small fraction of visible colors. Don't get me wrong, it covers most use cases just fine, but it would be nice to fill out the rest sometime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRGB (The colored blobby area represents all the shades the human eye can see, and the little triangle represents the colors in sRGB.) Oh and more contrast would be great too!
That (quoted) statement is probably wrong (with the uncertainty focused on how the future goes).
The Mantis shrimp[1] can see colors in up to 12 dimensions, instead of the pathetic three that we can see.
Further, a study done with mice which I can't find now involved implanting mice with the genes for a third type of color receptor, and they grew up being able to distinguish colors in three dimensions instead of two. In other words, if you add a few genes for more color dimensions, the brain adapts.
To advance the human capability to perceive color, it is probably just a matter of adding a few genes. This kind of stuff is within a century for sure. Our descendants could grow up being able to see visual subtleties we can't even imagine, if we choose to go that way.
You are right, we don't have access to the color palettes of the year 3000. The term is gamut (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamut) and the point is each current system has its own gamut which is a subset of visible colors.
All of today's print systems, monitors, etc cover a certain subset of visible colors. I think we can expect the technology to improve toward the year 3000, and there will be new colors that we can't represent today in sRGB. But until then, no, sadly we don't have access to (all) those color palettes.
But hey, the colors we have today are forward-compatible.
Addendum to myself:
http://www.coolorus.com/ for Photoshop or as a Flash standalone. It's more of a color-picker tool (based off of CorelDRAW's), but it has a schemer feature built-in.
Right? I was incredibly surprised that there aren't others like it (Kuler angers me for reasons I will not get into here). Colourlovers has ColorSchemer (http://www.colorschemer.com/osx_info.php) but I'm not a fan of the interface or the price tag.
I really like the concept and execution. Nice work! I'd like to know how you aggregated the color data. I found the js on github (https://github.com/nathanspeller/nathanspeller.github.com/bl...) and it just seems like you have a giant manually entered list of all the colors that are popular now, which won't be updated unless you update the colors.
I'm glad people are toying around with client-side color algorithms and coming up with ways for people to dynamically choose aesthetically nice colors. I worked on this project http://dph.am/projects/ImageEyeDropper/ about a year ago to let people grab colors off an image, find the color range with the highest frequency, and perform some of these color theory functions.
Awesome tool! Love the Sorry, no Internet Explorer note. It's always nice to let users know of browsers that aren't supported by your website :)
One minor suggestion: it would be nice to add a simple tooltip on hover of the different swatches and circles that give the rgb/hex value of that particular swatch/circle.
Great stuff. Offtopic,I recently started designing with crowdsourced pallets from colourlovers and it's been pleasant. You can actually search by mood/feel and you get nice set of colors.
I always find that starting with a selection of color can really jumpstart a design. It'd be really cool if this could also pull from other sources. If I could specify "1970s america" and get color pallets from photos or scanned design works, it would be truly awesome.
You should make it possible for people to explore it a bit more organically, say I click on a color, it should show other pallets with that color. It would also be nice to have an easy save image feature if someone finds a color they really like.
Snazzy app - I've used a little program called Agave (for Gnome) for this http://home.gna.org/colorscheme/ - it seems to be based on similar principles.
