I’m offering you an idea for a product. The implementation may be of less value to you than the underlying concept. There are several factors that make this a potentially valuable idea:

* Web sites and applications are becoming exponentially more complex.

* Cost-effective integration of multiple applications into sites is becoming more important.

* Site visitor expectations are becoming higher and higher.

* CSS allows almost complete dissociation of design and content.

The basic idea is to allow a person to submit an image and have the colors extracted from the image and substituted into a CSS file, thereby recoloring the site. If you have a site that integrates several applications, recoloring them with a consistent process can greatly reduce the cost of design updates and make application management (especially upgrades) much easier.

I developed a simple utility (robots.design) which will accept an image and the color attributes from CSS files, then create Linux sed commands that can be used to substitute the image colors into the CSS. I don’t think it is viable as a product in its current state, because the skill set required to take advantage of it spans too much of the web professional spectrum (most designers don’t use the Linux command line). A graceful interface or integration into one of your products may enhance DreamWeaver or other CreativeSuite products.

I didn’t invest alot of time in the tool, I built it for myself because I had to maintain code that had a difficult architecture and this solution allowed me to recolor the interface very efficiently. I still use it.

It is listed at HotScripts (http://www.hotscripts.com/Detailed/80489.html)

The software itself is probably of little value, and the processing is done on the server-side. Adobe has powerful image processing libraries that would eliminate the need for ImageMagick and the other open source components I used. I envision an option that would allow a designer to select a comp and indicate which CSS files should be updated with the colors.

Key considerations:

* Many applications break the CSS into several files, placing colors in one file. In that case, only that file needs to be processed.

* Sometimes, there are colors which you don’t want changed. A good example is error and warnings - which should stand out.

* Old sites which may have inline styles can be updated with this tool as well.

http://robots-wizard.com/robots.design/

If you have experience with DreamWeaver extensions, this may be a great contribution to the product. I don’t have the time to build a DreamWeaver extension, and I don’t need to - robots.design does exactly what I want it to.

This post has not been endorsed by Adobe. All trademarks are property of their respective holders.