It may sound like sacrilege, but one of the designer’s oldest tools could be heading for extinction.

From the pencil to the Mac, a designers job has always been about mastering and working with tools. Granted, most of the things a designer will reach for in the process of getting a job done will be stashed away somewhere on a hard drive, but there are still some physical tools that have been around for years that many would be hard pushed to do their jobs without.

One of these is the colour wheel – the graphic concept created by Johannes Itten in the mid 1900s which has helped generations of designers select the right colour for the right job from a choice of millions of colours.

But for how much longer? A recent article in the US Layers magazine seems to suggest the tide is turning against the traditional colour wheel as designers seeks out simpler alternatives.

Susan Prager, a graphic designer based in the US, is not alone in pointing out the faults of the millions of different colour combinations presented by traditional colour wheel and the long and tedious process involved in selecting the best matches.

“We do not need millions of colour choices. We just need the right ones,” she says.

But what are the alternatives? One highlighted by Layers magazine is a software based solution created by US developer Genopal, an application which aims to reduce the amount of time designers need to spend creating complimentary colour combinations.

CEO of Genopal Sivam Krish claims colour selection technology has been an area in need of innovation for some time.

“Colour selection for graphic and web designers has not seen any innovation for the last 15 years. Designers still struggle to find the right colour,” he says

According to Photoshop expert Gary Bouton, software based alternatives could also help reduce the other headache often connected with the traditional colour wheel - the problem of strong and saturated colours

“Something like Genopal is a boon to the design community because the palettes you can generate from it are just as sophisticated as your design work. A Genopal palette used in an artist’s work invites intrigue, thought, reflection and a lot of time spent examining the subtle and unobvious relationships between the colours,” he says.