Regular Notes on Design readers may recall our recent interview with Matthew Richmond of The Chopping Block. In addition to his popular design firm’s usual web projects, they recently built two phenomenal new panels for Adobe Illustrator CS3: kuler and knowhow. According to Richmond, these panels are valuable to just about every Illustrator user, so let’s find out how…

The kuler and knowhow panels look like any other panels in Illustrator, but are built with Flash and ActionScript.

You’ll find kuler and knowhow under Window > Adobe Labs in Illustrator. Visit Adobe Labs if you have trouble or can’t find them.

At first glance, knowhow is a simple list of hints associated with whatever tool you have selected. Helpful, definitely, but there’s more to it.

knowhow’s hints help you make sense of some of the more complex Illustrator tools.

Dig deeper and you’ll find loads of links to user-nominated tutorials on your tool of choice. That’s right, knowhow is online. Powered by popular bookmarking site del.icio.us, the panel shows you much more than basic Adobe tutorials. How-to content from all over the web is here—just click a link in knowhow to launch it in your browser.

Loads of user-selected tutorials help you learn more about your favorite Illustrator tools.

Still not impressed? Post your own how-tos on the web and contribute them using del.icio.us. All the details are at the Adobe Labs knowhow page.

Onward to kuler, the more colorful of the two Adobe Labs panels. Like the new Live Color feature in Illustrator wasn’t enough, kuler introduces a new level of color interaction.

The kuler panel brings Adobe’s popular kuler website right into Illustrator, using web feeds to present you with tons of color schemes created by other kuler users. The color schemes populating the kuler panel can be refreshed at any time and sorted by newest, most popular, highest rated, and even by specific creator if you have a favorite.

I find “Highest Rated” to be the most useful set of color schemes, but refresh the list often for the latest and greatest.

When a color combo inspires you, just click Add to Swatches to pop it into your Swatches palette. Or if you’ve created a particularly inspiring scheme yourself, click Upload and show the kuler world! Visit the Adobe Labs kuler page for more.

What makes both of these panels shine is the user participation. I hope this becomes a trend for Adobe. Working with top designers and regular users to pull clever and endlessly useful web-based content into the Adobe design environment can only be a good thing for all involved.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Graphic Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.