Hello COLOURlovers, I wanted to send you some new year wishes and to look back on a very interesting 12 months.  COLOURlovers has grown a lot in the last year, enjoyed some very nice praise and has survived through some tough economic times.  Thank you for sharing the love and for helping make this site such a creative, supportive and strong community.

Some Stats from 2008:

1,012,479 Colors Named
429,261 Palettes Added
321,434 Patterns Added
954,460 Comments Posted
7.5 Million visitors from around the world came to COLOURlovers.

Some of the Recognition We Received in 2008:

TIME's Top 50 Sites of 2008

Webby Awards: Best Community Site Nominee (2nd Year in a Row)

Webvisionary Awards: Best of Show, Best Community, Best Web Application

Most Popular Blog Posts of 2008:

As Seen By The Color Blind
1,000 (Colorful) Places to See Before You Die
All 120 Crayon Names, Color Codes and Fun Facts
Nudibranchs, The Most Colorful Creatures in the World
50 Colorful Wallpapers: Full Spectrum Love
Unusual Color Wheels Found in Life and Art
The Color of Money from Around the World

Hard Times Ahead

This will be a tough year for websites that survive on ad income.  We've already seen a friend & fellow creative community, JPG magazine say goodbye. We're aware of the pain this financial crunch will put us in as we already limit the amount of money we try and squeeze out of your eyeballs.  You can support COLOURlovers and help us continue to build this great community by becoming a sponsor, and continuing to share the color love with your friends and family.

It is a challenge for the small team that runs this site to keep it growing and evolving as fast as our great members would like, but we hope some partnerships get realized early in the new year which will allow us to keep the limited amount of quality advertising we have on the site, and still get the resources we need to continue making COLOURlovers all that it can be.  I have some very big plans and with your help I can see this site being an even more amazing resource for anyone looking for a bit of color inspiration... or just a little love.

A Year Filled with COLOURlove

For those keeping track, this is usually the time of year we release a new version of the COLOURlovers site... but because of the way things have been going economically, we had to push version 4 of the site off a bit... perhaps we'll get it all ready for a Valentines Day COLOURlove-Fest.

We'll continue to work hard adding in new features to the site and promise to give you some big developments in 2009.  It's going to be a big challenge to give you all what we have planned, but I promise that if you keep up your wonderful support and don't stop sharing the love... we'll keep striving to make this the best creative place on the internet.

To another wonderful year together. Happy COLOURloving.  Thank you.

-Darius (COLOURlover)