Here's a collection of textiles for today's color inspiration consideration. All of them found on flickr and shared through Creative Commons.

vaula

estherase

H is for Home

* debris *

vaula

craftapalooza

Orin Optiglot

craftapalooza

craftapalooza

craftapalooza

jovike

·júbilo·haku·

craftapalooza

vaula

Marshall Astor

fartbarker

vaula

Dan..

vaula

vaula

Mimi_K

vaula

vaula

knit 1 weave 1

vaula

vaula

vaula

vaula

sshaire productions

vaula

Eness, the interactive designers and "electronic puppets" based in Melbourne Austria, has a very impressive portfolio filled with colorful, thought provoking installations. Their work often involves motion tracking systems together with custom software and projectors, which allows them to project on any shaped surface. Their signature display features eyes, which the collective has a strong fascination with based around the idea of "an innate collective-subconscious functioning that causes hundreds of eyes to move in unison to concentrate on the same focal point. Aware of the gaze of the people around you, your curiosity leads you to turn to look in the same direction." Here's a look at some of their best projects explained in their own words.

LightScraper

More of a destination than a sculpture, the LightScraper is a towering vortex of visuals and sound feeding off it’s surroundings.

Featuring real-time 3D graphics and a human motion tracking system, the LightScraper explores new forms of engagement with technology and ultimately each other. The closer we go, the higher the glow.

No other color has been making news like magenta... First it was about T-Mobile's (Deutsche Telekom) ownership of the color, and now it's in the color news again for not even existing. So, does magenta exist?

Why it Doesn't Exist

The rumor started circulating when blogs picked up on an article entitled, "Magenta Ain't A Colour," written by Liz Elliott for the Neurostimulation Technology site biotele, which made claims that because the light spectrum is a straight line of single wavelength values (Red light the longest; violet the shortest) and magenta, or pink, is nowhere to be found, then it's not a real color.

A beam of white light is made up of all the colours in the spectrum. The range extends from red through to violet, with orange, yellow, green and blue in between. But there is one colour that is notable by its absence. Pink (or magenta, to use its official name) simply isn’t there.

She goes on to explain that even though magenta does not exist as a color in the spectrum, we can see it do to the summation of the wavelengths by our brain.

Colorjin, an Amsterdam based software company who specializes in color visualization for buildings and interiors, created this fun application: 'Paint the White House Purple'. It allows anyone to repaint and share what colors they would rather see the White House wear.

Besides being a lot of fun, this little tool is also a demonstration of one of their companies specialties, which a color lover might find interesting. Working in the opposite of our color tools, Colorjin allows you to upload photos of your home or space and apply new colors from a selection of different palettes. They also have a helpful section where you can gain a better understanding of color, shape and form.

Here’s a roundup of the most colorful art, products, websites and such that I’ve come across in the last week.

Art

Crayon Series by Christian Faure

Christian Faur

My earliest memories of making art involve the use of wax crayons. I can still remember the pleasure of opening a new box of crayons: the distinct smell of the wax, the beautifully colored tips, everything still perfect and unused. Using the first crayon from a new box always gave me a slight pain. Through a novel technique that I have developed, I again find myself working with the familiar form of the crayon.

Because of the three-dimensional nature of the crayons, the individual surface images appear to change form as one moves about the gallery space. The images completely disappear when viewed from close up, allowing one to read the horizontally sequenced crayon text and to take in the beautifully colored crayon tips -- all the while being reminded of that first box of crayons.

When most think or speak of light blue, what comes to mind is innocence, baby boy, calmness, and fresh. Being that it is not so overbearing, it would fit in nicely sprinkled throughout a home. What comes to mind when you see, think or hear of light blue?

This is a guest post written by London Based designer Roger Chasteauneuf of Fred Design. You can read the original post here.

So we all know that album covers and record sleeves often present some of the most creative design and illustration around. Recently I was reading in Grafik. about the Keane Under the Iron Sea album design with illustrations by Sanna Annuka and found the whole process fascinating. So I decided to write a post on album cover design.

But here's where I hit a stumbling block. What to choose as a showcase. There is some marvelous design out there and I would point viewers to agencies like non-format who specialise in this. However, for the purpose of this article I will focus on The Beatles album covers. They have a fascinating variation which spans across a long and changing time period.

Revolver

There is little doubt that the Beatles were progressive with their music, and their album covers certainly mirrored this. Here on revolver we see a original mix of illustration and print by illustrator Klaus Voorman, himself a guitarist of some note.

The earliest known compilation of medicinal substances, the Sushruta Samhita, dates back to 6th century BC. In Baghdad the first pharmacies were built in 754 and were state regulated by the 9th century. The pharmacy has been a part of society for ages, and as such, the the color & design of the signs and symbols marking the place where these medicinal substances could be found has a particular interest.

Common Pharmacy Symbols

The two symbols most commonly associated with pharmacy are the mortar and pestle and the ℞ (recipere) character, which is often written as "rx" in typed text. The show globe was also used in English speaking countries until the early 20th century. Pharmacy organizations often use other symbols, such as the Bowl of Hygieia, conical measures, and caduceuses in their logos. Other symbols are common in different countries: the green Greek cross in France, Argentina, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Spain, the increasingly-rare Gaper in The Netherlands, and a red stylized letter A in Germany and Austria (from Apotheke, the German word for pharmacy, from the same Greek root as the English word 'apothecary').

Great Beyond

ms oddgers

There are over 32 species of seahorse, mainly found in shallow tropical and temperate waters throughout the world. They prefer to live in sheltered areas such as sea grass beds, coral reefs, or mangroves. Colonies have been found in European waters such as the Thames Estuary. From North America down to South America there are approximately four species, ranging from very small in size (dwarf seahorses are only about an inch long) to those much larger, found off the Pacific Coast of Central America (the foot-long Hippocampus ingens). Hippocampus erectus are larger seahorses found anywhere from Nova Scotia down to around Uruguay. These fish form territories, with males staying in about one square meter of their habitat while females range about one hundred times that area. They bob around in sea grass meadows, mangrove stands, and coral reefs where they are camouflaged by murky brown and grey patterns that blend into the sea grass backgrounds. During social moments or in unusual surroundings, seahorses turn bright colors.

Stephen Childs

David Banes Photography

Nick Hobgood

Scubaben

Along with our ASE, GIMP, HTML and other download options; you can also download any of our more than 700,000 color palettes in 3 different Microsoft Expression formats. These options will make it easier for our creative friends using Expression tools to get the color love into their programs.

The Three Expression Formats:

Expression Design
Microsoft Expression Design is a small but professional and expressive vector graphics drawing and editing tool. It helps you create vector based graphics, integrate bitmaps along with your compositions, add dynamic effects to both vector and bitmap based objects and also allows you to manage Color Swatches, a concept that is very popular across any other vector design tool like Illustrator, CorelDraw or Freehand (R.I.P).

Expression Design is compared by some people to Adobe Illustrator. Expression Design, however, focuses only on digital graphics and has no features for printing. You can download a trial of Microsoft Expression Design from microsoft.com. Expression Design is included in Expression Studio, the box which includes the entire Expression family of products.

WPF Resource Dictionary (Brushes)
The WPF color palette you can download from COLOURlovers is a WPF Resource Dictionary, which is basically a library of resources (in this case colors) that you can add to your WPF project in Expression Blend.

What is WPF? WPF is our friendly name for Windows Presentation Foundation, a platform that helps designers and developers to create Windows desktop applications. WPF includes support for vector and bitmap graphics, animation, video, audio, interactivity, rich controls, 3D and more. With WPF, Microsoft has opened the doors for designers to become first-class citizens, collaborating in the creation of the next generation of Windows applications. This is an exciting creative and business opportunity for designers.