COLOURlovers enables you to create color palettes, share custom patterns, name colors, and discuss color inspiration ideas.  Over a million user-submitted color palettes is the site’s feature attraction, all of which can be downloaded in various formats.  COLOURlovers has various tools for selecting colors that work well together, gathering color palettes from photos, and customizing the Twitter.  The patterns are handy, downloadable for smartphones and wallpaper in proper dimensions.

The online store also has some cool products.  ColorSchemer Studio is a Mac application for creating professional color harmonies in both RGB and CMYK.  Spoonflower is an on-demand fabric printing service for ordering any pattern on high-quality fabric.  Imagekind lets you buy any palette or pattern as a poster, canvas, card, and many other printed forms.  Moo is a service for ordering personalizable cards of printed palettes with multiple designs per pack.  Shirts can also be bought of the heart colorblind test Can you see the love?

CHROMAom, from YC W10, makes COLOURlovers.  The company team all has prior design experience.  Darius Monsef, the CEO, previously studied color theory, fashion design, and worked at Microsoft LiveLabs.  Aaron Epstein, VP of Product, created ColorSchemer over a decade ago prior to merging with CHROMAom.  Chris Williams, VP of Technology, has many years of experience in Internet development.

I’m writing about COLOURlovers because I actually use it.  Like many developers, I’m not design-oriented and frequently need color palettes for various projects.  The patterns are also a good source of free and original iPhone backgrounds.  With so many startups these days, many of them are just not very good.  COLOURlovers is convenient and useful.  And those characteristics on their own are enough to make COLOURlovers newsworthy.