If you’re working in Adobe Creative Suite applications all day, you’re no stranger to keyboard shortcuts. In addition to being the only way to get anything done in Photoshop, keyboard shortcuts are sort of a pain in the neck to keep track of and remember.

The kind folks at Logitech have created a tool called the NuLOOQ Navigator. It sits on your desk in the non-mousing hand, and it provides access to an array of keyboard shortcuts that control the most common tools. And it works for all of the Adobe Creative Suite applications, too. It’s controlled by software, so it’s easy to program.

Looks like a nice device with a gentle learning curve. Now if only we could do something about that name…

[link via Breathing in Stereo]

As far as color pickers and color matchers go, ColorBlender has most of them beat.

Start by moving the sliders to choose your primary color in RGB values. The rest of the palette will be filled out with a “blend” of colors that’s calculated dynamically. You can then hone the colors individually or keep sliding to choose new blends. When you arrive at a mixture of colors that you like, you can save your values and access them in another session (as long as you have cookies enabled). You can also email the values, save them as a Photoshop ACT or an Illustrator EPS file.

ColorBlender is a truly fantastic tool for building complimentary palettes. Experiment and make something pretty!

Former Wired News editor and all-around smart guy Tim Barkow constructed an amazing graphics experiment last year on his site Thinkcorps. The project involved painting via RSS.

Tim deconstructed a photograph of his girlfriend, Patricia, breaking it down into individual pixels. He recorded the RGB value and grid location of every pixel in the image. He then sent out an RSS feed every two hours containing coordinates and RGB values for thirty of the pixels in the photo. The image was slowly drawn at a rate of 360 pixels per day.

One year of RSS feeds later, and we see a complete photograph of two women holding their shoes as they wade in a river. The image has finished building, and you can view the final product alongside the RSS that built it at the project’s site, pkdot.com

Tim’s Painting via RSS experiment is a hack of the VSSTV, or the Very Slow Scan Television. The VSSTV uses a set of red, green, and blue syringes to fill a sheet of bubble wrap with color. Very, very slowly. Now who says there’s nothing good on TV?