ColoRotate – rethinking the color picker

In terms of interface innovations I think it is safe to say that nothing has progressed less when it comes to application interfaces than the color picker. ColoRotate is a new site that looks to change that by replacing the traditional 2D circles or sliders with a 3D cone. The center of the cone is made up of the specrtum of colors and the saturation is controlled by height of the cone. Once have the colors you want you then modify the entire palette as a group which is a nice piece of functionality that would come in handy in some other programs. The other feature I had never seen before was the ability to look at your palette in the way some one who is color blind would see it through a red-green deficiencies. There is a lot of new and interesting thinking here and I hope the folks over at Adobe at paying attention because I would rather have something like this than yet another useless drop shadow filter that isn’t good for anything but polluting the portfolios of art school students.