Colorful Expression

Colorful Expression was designed to be an add-in for Expression Blend and Expression Design that brings you the Adobe Kuler community directly into your toolbox. It adds a new palette to your design environment, making it easy to leverage the community to find the perfect color theme for your application or design. The add-in also available as a standalone application, making it useful for web developers working in Visual Studio or Expression Web to select colors for your CSS style sheets.

The key feature of the add-in is to select colors. The eyedropper tool in Design lets you click anywhere on the screen to select a color. Simply click the eyedropper in your color panel, and click on one of the colors in the Colorful Expression panel.

You can also copy colors to the clipboard by clicking the copy-button. When you paste the color theme onto the design surface you’ll get five rectangles and the name of the color. This lets you collect interesting themes directly in your design file by copying them onto the document.

Expression Blend supports exporting and importing color swatch libraries through a simple XML file format. Colorful Expression allows you to save a theme as a swatch library you can import into Design. The screenshot shows the “Buddah in Rain” theme imported to the swatch library.

The add-in works almost the same way in Blend as in Design but with some minor differences. In Blend you can use the Ctrl+C key combination to invoke the copy command, making it a lot easier to copy/paste themes onto the design surface. When you paste a theme onto the surface you will get a grid containing five rectangles and a text block.

The rectangles are painted with a solid color brush resource, and each of the colors gets added to the resource collection of the page. If you go into XAML-view and paste the theme you will get five solid color brush resource elements you can add to any resource collection. The Blend add-in also supports drag and drop, letting you drag color themes onto the design surface.

Standalone application The standalone application gives you most of the same features as the Blend and Design add-in. You can copy or drag themes into Blend, and you can save Design swatch libraries. The stand alone application is useful if you don’t want to run the add-in all the time or if you don’t use Expression Studio. You can also hold down control and click a single color to copy it to the clipboard as a RGB HEX color. That way you can use the standalone application as a color picker for any application using HEX colors, such as CSS style sheets.