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Colourlovers Raises $1 Million To Make Everyone An Artist (techcrunch.com)
98 points by citizenkeys on May 3, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 29 comments


I don't know why there is hate in the comments. Just because the word "color" is involved, doesn't mean these guys don't actually deserve the -- much more reasonable -- funding.

As a non-designer, I can testify that colourlovers is solving a problem for me. If they give me an even better crutch when it comes to design, I can easily see paying for it.

Somebody mentioned Kuler. Kuler is actually not very good. It's flash based, lacks the polish, and I find myself incredibly frustrated every time I sit down to use it. Colourlovers, on the other hand, leaves me with positive emotions every single time. In my mind, the two are not comparable.


Agreed. There are a lot of "color scheme" sites, but Colourlovers is by far the best.

I use Colourlovers all the time for color inspiration and palettes. Its a wonderful site.


As a developer who is semi-color-blind but still likes to dabble in graphic design, I'm a fan of colourlovers. I can't pick a palette to save my life, so I just pick one off of there. :)


This was the first startup I ever "signed up" for back in 2004 (before I even knew what a startup was).

Amazing to see how much it grew in those 7 years.

Congrats to everyone involved!!!!


Ditto. I've been using this site since Darius called himself Prettyboy on a little known forum. Been great watching it grow over the years.


Thanks for sharing the love!


Oh, and we're hiring and we'd love to work with you! http://clrlv.rs/workwithcl


We were actually YC W10 :)

(edit: original title referenced "YC W11")


I see now... CHROMAom was the original name?


Yup, it's still our legal parent company name, but we found that when we told people we were CHROMAom they said "huh?", and when we said we were COLOURlovers they said "I know COLOURlovers!"


Apparently the new funding buzzwords are "mobile, local, social and color"


And "lean" isn't a buzzword? What's with the hate?


Pffft. We were into color way before $41M :)


No hate. Just making a joke. Your Mac app looks really great.


> (if you’re interested they’re targeting hires in Portland — Monsef describes the hiring market in San Francisco as “pretty nutty”...

A bit unrelated but does anybody else feel frustrated when a closing bracket is omitted in an article? Perhaps it is too much lisp exposure but I always keep scanning the text for that closing braket looking to find the end of the "scope" of the bracketed sentence.


Both Colourlovers and Adobe Kuler have non-commercial palette API´s. I know, because I thought about supporting them in this - http://teppefall.com/products/colorspace

So they must be totally paranoid about traffic numbers, social hooks and brand dillution. And it seems to be a winning formula. Impressive.


Looks like a very interesting app, but all the links (screenshots for each OS, clicking the screenshot itself) on that page seem to be broken.


Colourlovers is a cool site. I'm not a colour geek, but I can appreciate what darius has achieved (and congrats) with cultivating such a large community and I'm glad it has worked out financially well for the team.

I'm just as curious as anyone how CL will monetize this since I'm not the target audience but whatever it is, it will be interesting to watch.


How will they make money?


I was looking for an app like that. Ideas for monetization: - license technology to interior designers - sell trends data to paint retailers - build a deviant art community where people sell their pattern kind of hard to guess frankly ... more usage will help! definitely solves a good problem I had.


Congrats to Darius, Aaron, and co.


Congrats! I use Colourlovers a lot and I think it's a great service. My application requires a lot of palettes (I can "themes"), over 200 of them, all of which come from Colourlovers. I tried to use Kuler, but it's just not as good.


Great site and great community.

I use this site all the time to get inspiration from the color palettes.

Congrats!


So quickly people forget Adobe's free Kuler:

http://kuler.adobe.com


I had been under the impression that kuler was a knockoff of colourlovers, but I'm on my mobile and am having a hard time finding evidence.


Kuler has been around since November of 2006 if I remember correctly....


And COLOURlovers has been around since Dec 04.



O wow. I've been having fun there and I didn't even know y'all were YC backed. Congrats.




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