Until relatively recently in human history, the colour blue didn’t exist. It is conspicuously absent from most ancient languages, including Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Hindustani, Icelandic and Hebrew.

It's as if our ancestors were all colour blind, but only when it came to shades of blue. Today I discovered why.

Whether you're editing a photo or creating a graphic design, having an established colour palette can make your life a lot easier. This tool generates a large selection of colours you can use in your design from a single photo.

There's a lot of work that goes into laying out a beautiful home. Art can help jazz up the place, but the last thing you want is a nice print that clashes with your room's colour theme. ColorSearch can help.

Brief news items of note for Lifehacker readers, including: New all-female Ghostbusters costumes revealed, cheap Disney Blu-rays, a celebration of everyday colour to make you smile.

Whether you're picking up paint or trying to match some clothing items, here's the reason why you're better off not trusting your memory and taking a photo instead.

iOS/Web: Whether you're designing a web page or trying to find a decorating theme for your home, the right colour scheme is essential. The web site and iOS app Coloors makes finding new palettes as easy as pressing the space bar.

Colours are important to making things look good, whether it's the clothes you wear or the presentation you give at work. But not everyone instinctively knows that orange and blue is a perfect combination. If you can't trust your own judgement, understand and rely on the basics of colour theory to always pick the right colours.

Colours are important to make your presentations look good, but not everyone has a good sense of which ones complement each other. Zach Holman suggests a cheat: go to a site like ColourLovers and look through palettes suggested by designers.

The distinctive purple tone used on Cadbury chocolate wrappers (Pantone 2685C purple) isn't just instantly recognisable -- it's a legally-protected trademark. That trademark was upheld this week in a UK legal battle between Cadbury and rival Nestle, leaving the Kraft-owned Cadbury with the exclusive right to use the shade on chocolate bars and drinks.

Colorapi is a slick web app that serves one purpose: to help people choose colour palettes according to general ideas by using photos. Using the web app is as simple as entering a search term for whatever you want the colour schemes to be inspired by, like summer.

Android: LifeDropper is a tiny app that uses your phone's camera to snap a picture and present information about the dominant colour in the centre of the frame. It's meant to be used just like the "eyedropper" tool that's in nearly every image-editing app in existence, except instead of being used on a screen, it's for real life.

If you're stressed out after a whole week of work, web app Xoki will relax you by creating a custom, blank, colour-changing background in your browser.

Many of us spend hours floundering around looking for just the right colours while designing a website, presentation or pamphlet. Design blog Before & After put together a great booklet detailing a little beginner's colour theory for complimenting your next effort.

Whether you're putting together a portfolio website or just slapping together some slides, knowing how colours affect the minds of your audience makes your message more appealing. Smashing magazine offers a post that serves as Colour Psychology 101 for would-be designers.

If you've tried out web-based palette generators and been underwhelmed, you might want to take Color Scheme Designer for a spin. It combines the features of many other generators into a unique, easy-to-use palette creator.

Windows only: MouseZoom is a tiny portable tool that functions both as a screen magnifier and a colour picker.

Need a new colour palette for your next design project? ColorRotate is a colour palette generator with a heavy dose of eye candy and easy-to-use controls.

Mac only: Colour picker application Mondrianum adds Adobe Kuler colour schemes in a plug-in for OS X—choosing killer colour schemes has never been easier. Once installed, using the application is as simple as opening the colour picker in any application that supports choosing colours with the built-in picker, and then clicking the Mondrianum icon on the right. You can search for colour schemes on the Kuler web site, though accessing the colour scheme data requires an internet connection, so you'll need to be online for it to work—but colour schemes can be saved as Apple colour lists for offline use, making this a great application for anybody trying to find the right colours for their projects.Mondrianum is a free download for Mac, works in most Cocoa apps. If you'd rather create a colour scheme from a picture, check out previously mentioned Colours Pallete Generator, or get colour codes in Firefox with ColorZilla.

Mondrianum

Colors Palette Generator turns a picture with a pleasing look into a palette of equally pleasing colours for your web site or design project. You can upload any PNG, GIF or JPEG that is less than 1MB in size and Colours Palette Generator will extract colours from it. The application creates three basic palettes of the light, medium, and dark colours, as well as a grid of 49 shades from the image if you're not satisfied with the palettes it has created. Once you've got the look you like, you can export it as either a Photoshop swatches file or as a CSS stylesheet. Free to use, no sign-up required.

Colors Palette Generator