I don't always know which colours go, but at least I now know where to go to get them.

It's a sad confession for a designer, I know, but it's born out of experience of hearing colour consultants speak about colour at a professional level.

It showed me I really have no idea.

We used to share office space with a colour forecasting company. The sort of business that predicts what we're all going to be wearing this time next year or two years hence. They had a tiny little office packed to the rafters with colour prediction books and swatches in every imaginable material. The cramped space meant they often had their door open to the communal corridor and inevitably their conversations would float out. Here's a typical sample: "Apple and Banana"..."Peach and Plum"..."Apricot and Raspberry"... These fruity couplets would continue in a three way competition for the most wonderful combination until someone made a complete Faux Pas and mentioned something like, "Kiwi and Kumquat". Noooo! No! No! No! went the cry from the other participants.

I knew then that I was missing something. Why was "Apple and Banana" acceptable but "Kiwi and Kumquat" beyond the pale? Was that the inside of a kiwi or the brown furry wrapper? Was the apple a Golden Delicious or Braeburn? So many unanswered questions. Clearly colour was something of a Black art (I realise black isn't a colour by the way, I do remember that much from my secondary school art classes).

If you're similarly clueless about colour then help is at hand in the form of Kuler from Adobe. It's a web-hosted application for exploring, creating and sharing color themes. It generates palettes of analogous, monochromatic, triad and complementary colours from either a 'seed' colour you enter or from an image. Very addictive.

Now, what goes nicely with Puce.