Colourlovers Mixes With ColorSchemer, Added To Twitter's Design Palette

Design startup COLOURlovers.com, which is a creative community for color, has merged with ColorSchemer, a desktop color matching software. The Y Combinator-backed merged company, which is called CHROMAom, will launch in the next few months as the ultimate color authority, aiming to be the “Nielsen for all things color.”

COLOURlovers officially completed the merger with ColorSchemer in November of 2009. Launched in 2006, COLOURlovers is a resource for people who use color and provides a place to compare and share color palettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews. The site is currently seeing one million unique visitors a month and their users have created 1 million color palettes.

Since the merger, COLOURlovers has been steadily growing its offerings and even struck a partnership with Twitter. When you go to your Design Settings within Twitter, you’ll see a link to COLOURlovers’ Themeleon, a tool that lets Twitter users create customized and sleek profile pages. In the past few months, Themeleon has been used to design and add color to over 500,000 Twitter profiles.

COLOURlovers and ColorSchemer have also released a new web-based pattern design tool, called Seamless, which allows you to design seamless patterns. With COLOURlovers’ editing tools you can resize, rotate and add shapes, lines and text to the canvas and it tiles automatically. You can then save and use your pattern and template.

Another new focus for the merged company is to partner with manufacturers to create products from the designs created on the site. You can create fabric, t-shirts, artwork, prints, and more from designs created on COLOURlovers. The startup’s co-founder Darius Monsef, who was formerly a engineer and designer for Microsoft’s Photosynth, tells me that eventually they’d like to become the Etsy for color design, allowing anyone to create and then sell design-related products on the site.

While CHROMAom hasn’t been launched yet, its safe to say that COLOURlovers is fast becoming the go to site for all things color. Monsef hopes that CHROMAom will eventually be the global color authority to track all realtime information and research on color.