This is the second post of my “nice touches” series of natty little pieces of web application design that really impressed me.

Colour Lovers Pattern Editor

A cool article by Ann at SEO Smarty ended with a couple of links to sweet tools. One of which is the Colour Lovers Pattern Tool.

This tool is easy to use and built to a very high standard, as I’ve come to expect from Colour Lovers. It uses loads of AJAX and the loading indicator caught my eye - it is a beating heart!

Annoyingly, the site is too quick for me to get a screen grab on my ancient ibook, so you will have to see it for yourselves.

Many other sites that use AJAX (including this one) have a spinning indicator like the Firefox page loading icon, or an oscillating bar which is quite techie and clinical. The use of a beating heart is genius for several reasons:

• It fits right in with the Colour Lovers branding - they already use hearts for their favicon.
• Heartbeats are often found in computer hardware, telling you that a headless server is working or a router is configured OK.
• Even if you’re not a techie, you know that the beating heart means that something is “alive” and working.
• It made me smile during a busy day.

So there we have, the tiniest of design touches but pure gold!