Colourlovers Raises $1 Million To Make Everyone An Artist

I don't know why there is hate in the comments. Just because the word "color" is involved, doesn't mean these guys don't actually deserve the -- much more reasonable -- funding.

As a non-designer, I can testify that colourlovers is solving a problem for me. If they give me an even better crutch when it comes to design, I can easily see paying for it.

Somebody mentioned Kuler. Kuler is actually not very good. It's flash based, lacks the polish, and I find myself incredibly frustrated every time I sit down to use it. Colourlovers, on the other hand, leaves me with positive emotions every single time. In my mind, the two are not comparable.

As a developer who is semi-color-blind but still likes to dabble in graphic design, I'm a fan of colourlovers. I can't pick a palette to save my life, so I just pick one off of there. :)

This was the first startup I ever "signed up" for back in 2004 (before I even knew what a startup was).

Amazing to see how much it grew in those 7 years.

Congrats to everyone involved!!!!

We were actually YC W10 :)

(edit: original title referenced "YC W11")

Oh, and we're hiring and we'd love to work with you! http://clrlv.rs/workwithcl

Apparently the new funding buzzwords are "mobile, local, social and color"

> (if you’re interested they’re targeting hires in Portland — Monsef describes the hiring market in San Francisco as “pretty nutty”...

A bit unrelated but does anybody else feel frustrated when a closing bracket is omitted in an article? Perhaps it is too much lisp exposure but I always keep scanning the text for that closing braket looking to find the end of the "scope" of the bracketed sentence.

Both Colourlovers and Adobe Kuler have non-commercial palette API´s. I know, because I thought about supporting them in this - http://teppefall.com/products/colorspace

So they must be totally paranoid about traffic numbers, social hooks and brand dillution. And it seems to be a winning formula. Impressive.

Colourlovers is a cool site. I'm not a colour geek, but I can appreciate what darius has achieved (and congrats) with cultivating such a large community and I'm glad it has worked out financially well for the team.

I'm just as curious as anyone how CL will monetize this since I'm not the target audience but whatever it is, it will be interesting to watch.

How will they make money?

Great site and great community.

I use this site all the time to get inspiration from the color palettes.

Congrats!

I was looking for an app like that. Ideas for monetization: - license technology to interior designers - sell trends data to paint retailers - build a deviant art community where people sell their pattern kind of hard to guess frankly ... more usage will help! definitely solves a good problem I had.

Congrats to Darius, Aaron, and co.

Congrats! I use Colourlovers a lot and I think it's a great service. My application requires a lot of palettes (I can "themes"), over 200 of them, all of which come from Colourlovers. I tried to use Kuler, but it's just not as good.

So quickly people forget Adobe's free Kuler:

http://kuler.adobe.com

O wow. I've been having fun there and I didn't even know y'all were YC backed. Congrats.