kudos to kuler.

I am by no means a graphic designer, but thankfully in my job I do get the opportunity to exercise my creative/artistic juices from time to time. Recently I’ve been working on updates to materials for our “East Coast Plane Trip“, a fall visitation program for students from (you guessed it) the East Coast. Our logo was in need of a major overhaul, and here’s what I came up with:

I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out, but none of it would have been possible without kuler, one of my newest sources for design inspiration. With no color theory background to my credit, this site has been an excellent resource.

I needed to come up with a gradient scheme for the background of the logo, so I simply did a search for “sky” among the themes that other users have created. From there I was able to pull a couple of my favorite colors (using hex values) to create my gradient.

Users can also upload a photo (or quickly import from Flickr) and Kuler will create a theme from that photo. So slick.

The pièce de résistance?  A Dashboard widget for Mac.