Color deserves some serious respect. We first learn about color as a game when we are kids. It's fun to mix each one to see what kind of mess you'll get next. For designers, color is a fascination that started from that innocent beginning. Little did we know that color would rule our designer lives from then on.

The use of color can be a very delicate art. It's not all fun and messes (hopefully it's not messy). It's actually math. I know, math is gross, but not when it comes to color. If you've looked at a color wheel recently, you'll have realized that it's basically a graph of numbers hiding behind varying degrees of the primary colors mixed together along with black and white.

As you can see from the color wheel image above, there are a lot of colors out there. And colors are also related to each other. Here's an experiment you can do, either on paper or on the computer. Draw out four red squares, then draw four more squares of different colors containing each of the red squares. The colors should be solid. Looking at each square set, notice how the red-colored squares change in appearance depending on the color that surrounds them. Abra-cadabra! It's magic!

And so it's a designers job to organize all those colors into schemes, and worry about hues, shades, intensities, etc. Luckily, there are tools to help us do that. One of the better ones out there is Kuler. It's an extension of Adobe, but what's great is that in Photoshop CS4 it's included. You can also access it separately, just head over to www.adobe.com/products/kuler and be prepared to be amazed. Another nifty gadget I recommend is Color Jack. It's similar to Kuler and actually has a few extra color settings. The nifty part is that you can download it as a widget into your dashboard. Check it out at http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/reference/colortheory.html. If you just want to play around with it, go to www.colorjack.com/sphere where it's already built into their website.

So if you're like me and a chicken at math, then let these number-crunching tools do the math for you. You'll be able to get great color schemes without a getting headache.