* 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.

Some colors should not be changed - specifically error and warning displays which are traditionally red and yellow respectively. A backup of the CSS files was invaluable, since a dojo upgrade only required CSS upgrades for the dojo files (dojo.css, dijit.css, tundra.css).

Since the objective was a neutral color scheme, I put greyscale color codes into the image/new color area. I ran the third script on the CSS files, and on the HTML (some inline styles were there). Took all those colors and pasted them into the existing CSS color block, and ran the tool.

Applied the second set of sed commands, and it looked pretty good.

I did change some of the colors manually to make it look better, but in 2 hours, I had a completely recolored application. The last time, it took me 2 days.

Later note: I ran robots.design on a different application, with a much more sophisticated design, including dojo’s tundra theme, and it performed extremely well. I copied the dojo .css files into the application’s css directory, then ran robots.design. I didn’t copy the dojo .css files back into the dojo tree, because once they have been modified, they aren’t truly ‘tundra’.