Sherwin-Williams' color forecast for 2010, part four --the last day

Sherwin-Williams' final predictive palette for 2010 is what they're calling Refreshed. It's playful and bright and is an opposite direction reaction to the current mood of doom and gloom that will swallow you whole if you let it. It's a welcome diversion and every time I look at this I'm reminded of Kelly James from Design Ties. I don't think anything could get that woman down. Right Kelly? From Sherwin-Williams' website:

Refreshed

exuberant, fresh, optimism

Tropical blooms. Sunny days. Playful exploration. It's time to take a vacation and let our cares melt away. Happy spaces are here again, bringing fresh florals, bright juicy colors and exuberant combinations. It's the kaleidoscopic sprit of the '60s married to the jewel tones of the '80s, with a global twist. Cultural influences and motifs mingle freely, creating a bohemian mosiac that sings in perfect harmony.

Animated Coral SW 6878

Pickle SW 6725

Fun Yellow SW 6908

Sapphire SW 6963

Summer Day SW 6662

Verve Violet SW 6979

So what's this one do for you? On the whole, how on do you think Sherwin-Williams is with this whole series of palettes? I find these kinds of predictions to be captivating. Despite how it may appear on the surface, these things have a huge amount of thought and research behind them. If you could predict a couple of colors to sum up what we'll find next year, what would they be and why?

Sherwin-Williams' color forecast for 2010, part three

The third palette in Sherwin-Williams' forecast is Treasured and is an outgrowth of an impulse to resist the disposable nature of western culture. It conjures a renewed appreciation for handmade, quality goods bought for the long term. It's an impulse I welcome. From Sherwin-Williams' website:

Treasured

aging, layers, artisan

A throwaway society? That's so yesterday. We're now making savvy, resourceful use of what we have, discovering untold stories in exposed, painted layers. From flea-market finds to artisan-made pieces, imperfections can lend rich character to our environments. The palette reflects the beauty of natural aging, mellowing and weathering, evoking quality materials that have stood the test of time and become heirlooms.

Smoky Blue SW 7604

Sequin SW 6394

Caribbean Coral SW 2854

Interactive Cream SW 6113

Gallery Green SW 0015

Sturdy Brown SW 6097

Do you recognize any of these colors or this sentiment? I get it that this is coming from a paint company, but these palettes are much bigger than mere paint. Discuss.

Sherwin-William's forecast for 2010, part two

The second palette in Sherwin-Williams' 2010 color forecast is what they're calling Simplified. In an homage to three women I admire a great deal, I propose that we call it the Joni Webb, Gina Milne and Brooke Gianetti palette. These muted, luxurious colors always remind me of them. Look through all three of their blogs and you'll see what I mean. They espouse a simple elegance that these colors really capture. I'm calling this palette a spot on prediction. From Sherwin-Williams' website:

Simplified
translucent, structure, sophisticated

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." That timeless wisdom from Leonardo da Vinci is now a modern mantra. Less is clearly the new more. But the aesthetic is artful rather than austere, with well-tailored lines and sheer, translucent materials that reveal shape and structure. Clarity and integrity are critical. We need to know and trust what we're bringing into our environments. The hues are calm, subtle and nuanced, with undertones that shift according to their surroundings, for easy versatility.

How now do you think these are? How lasting do you think this palette will be?

Magnetic Gray SW 7058

Moderate White SW 6140

Enigma SW 6018

Whitetail SW 7103

Serious Gray SW 6256

Butter Up SW 6681

Sherwin-Williams' color forecast for 2010, part one

Well since it's October already, that can only mean one thing, it's time for out pals at Sherwin-Williams to roll out their color forecasts for next year. As they are wont, the color team at Sherwin-Williams has come out with four primary palettes. These are by no means definitive, but are meant to act as a springboard for designers to take and personalize these palettes.

I see a lot of these forecasted trends happening already and I'd say that Sherwin-Williams is right on. For the next couple of days, I'm going to run their selected palettes. First up is what they're calling Rooted. Here's what they're saying is the ethos behind it:

Rooted
mystery, enduring, natural

It's human instinct to seek the safety of the tribe. In today's complicated world, there's something deeply satisfying about re-exploring the world's oldest, most enduring cultures. African, Aboriginal and Native American influences are converging to create a new tribal style with a drumbeat all its own. The colors are rich and earthy, with a hint of mystery. The appeal is as natural as the elements.

Oceanside SW 6496

Foothills SW 7514

Nomadic Desert SW 6107

Darkroom SW 7083

Rookwood Amber SW 2817

Red Tomato SW 6607

While no one's suggesting that you paint your house in this palette exactly, what do you think of these colors?

Images and color swatches from Sherwin-Williams

"Our Perception of Color" as seen in Decorati

Decorati, if you don't know, is a brilliant online design magazine and resource founded in San Francisco by the equally brilliant Shane Reilly. I met Shane through Twitter (@chiefdecorati) at the beginning of the summer. That I could meet and communicate with Shane Reilly is yet another reason I've become such an advocate of Twitter. I swear, through Twitter I get to interact directly with people I'd never meet under ordinary circumstances. Spend some time poking through Decorati, you will be glad you did. As if Decorati weren't enough, Shane also writes a personal blog and that's always worth a read too. Her blog is called Shane's Studio.

Anyhow, at the beginning of August, someone from Benjamin Moore posted a short piece on Decorati concerning color perception and I'm going to reprint it here.

Defining Color

The perception of color is a phenomenon of light - a form of energy with its own frequency and wavelength. Shine a light through a prism and you’ll see it divide into six color families: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. White light is the combination of all colors, while black is the absence of all colors. We perceive color due to the pigments in a given object. A blue pillow appears blue to our eyes because the pigment in the pillow is absorbing all the colors of the light except for the color blue reflecting back to us.

Color and Light

Have you ever tried to match a color swatch in a store only to find it looks like a completely different color when you bring it home? You’ve just experienced metamerism, the occurrence of colors seemingly changing when viewed under different light sources. Some colors are more prone to this phenomenon than others, including tans, taupes, grays, grayed-blues, mauves, lilacs, and grayed yellow-greens such as celadon. View color swatches in the actual space and lighting conditions in which they are being used.

Color and Space

Space affects how we perceive color, so keep proportion and scale in mind when making your color selections, along with whether you want the room to feel intimate or open. Consider elements such as ceiling height, visible wall space, furnishings, and large pieces of artwork, along with the number of windows and doorways in a room.

How Colors Affect Other Colors

Colors that surround a given color affect how we perceive that color. An off-white wall can appear pink when paired with a vibrant red carpet. Complementary colors, such as red and green, enhance each other’s color quality. Two squares of the identical shade of gray will appear to differ from one another when one is placed against a white background and the other against black.

That's great stuff and every word of it's true. It can be difficult to get accurate information about the science lurking behind the world of color but it's there. Thank you Benjamin Moore for so thorough an explanation and thank you Decorati for running it.

Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see

The brilliant Phil Plait, an astronomer who writes the blog Bad Astronomy, posted this yesterday and I am amazed.

You can see embedded spirals in this image in green, pink-orange and blue. Well, wonder of wonders, the green and the blue are actually the same color. Phil popped the original image into Photoshop and isolated the "two" colors to be sure. Here they are side by side.

Sure enough, they are both RGB 0, 255, 150.

Human brains are amazing machines, but cameras they are not. I deal with identifying colors for a living and I'm pretty aware of the tricks my brain can play when I'm trying to judge what color a specific color is. I always look at colors in isolation when I can and have been known to mask off whole sections of carpet patterns so that I can really see the color I'm looking at. I warn people all the time about looking at paint chips in a fan deck --don't do it! Your brain can't judge with any degree of accuracy a color that's displayed in a line up of similarly hued and tinted colors.

So let's look at what's going on with this fantastic optical illusion.

These look like different colors because this illustration is shortchanging our brains' ability to contextualize these "blue" and "green" colors. As you can see in the close up, the magenta and orange stripes aren't continuous. The orange stripes don't go through the "blue" spiral and the magenta stripes don't go through the "green" one.

Without any conscious awareness of it, our brains are forced to see the "green" stripe in contrast with the orange stripe and the color reads as green. Similarly, the same "green" color, when we're forced to compare it to magenta reads as blue. To prove this, concentrate on the spot where the "blue" stripe butts into the orange stripe on the right side of the image. If you stare at it long enough it will read as the same green as the stripes on the left side of the image. But only at the point where the two colors intersect. It's wild! If I stare at that intersecting point, my brain will let me see the green but only at the intersecting point. If I widen my focus slightly, it still looks blue in the center of the stripe.

Human brains are amazing things but they cheat and play fill in the blanks all the time. As a designer, I think I'm pretty aware of this and I'm pretty adept at forcing perspective and hiding flaws. Usually, I'm pretty good at seeing though these kinds of optical illusions. I have to say though, that this one surprised me. I love this kind of stuff!

A friend like Ben

If Sherwin-Williams' entry into the color-specifier-for-iPhone market left me rather cold yesterday, I was warmed right back up by Benjamin Moore's more usable variation on that theme, ben. Ben's unveiling was delayed by a week or so, but it was worth the wait.

Clearly, Benjamin Moore spent a lot more money on the development and roll-out of ben and I think it was money well-spent. Ben is a very well thought out app and one I'm sure I will use in my day to day life.

Ben suffers from the same camera limitations that Sherwin-Williams' ColorSnap does and ben also failed my take-a-photo-of-a-color-chip test. If you missed my review of ColorSnap yesterday, I took a photo of a Sherwin-Williams color chip and tried to have ColorSnap identify the color correctly. ColorSnap couldn't do it. Well neither can ben, and I think that's a camera shortcoming more than an app shortcoming. I'll be interested to see how these apps fare in a similar test with the better camera coming in the new iPhones. We'll see.

Anyhow, ben takes a little longer to load than ColorSnap does, but it's still pretty fast.

Once it's loaded, it lands on a start screen that allows you to select between taking a photo or retrieving a photo from your phone's archives.

I selected a photo of a brightly-colored floor tile.

Once the photo's selected and imported (a process that takes a few seconds at most), you can zoom or crop the imported photo any way you'd like.

Here's the zoomed in image of the tile pattern.

So now that my photo's zoomed, cropped and active; all I need to do is touch anywhere on the photo and ben matches what ever color I'm touching to one of the 3,000 colors in Benjamin Moore's palette.

When I touch the blue in the lower left quadrant of this photo, ben matches it to Benjamin Moore's 2067-20, Starry Night Blue. Ben's also showing a virtual fan deck along the bottom of the page. If I click on any one of those color blocks, I get a full-screen view of the color with the virtual fan deck still below the main color..

When I tap Starry Night Blue for the second time, I get a true full-screen view with no visual distractions.

If I tap the screen twice, I go back to the photo where I started. Now, I can touch anywhere on my photo and get an instantaneous color match. Here's the blue-gray color below the black bar in the upper right quadrant.

Here's the purple in the lower right quadrant.

The yellow from the upper left quadrant.

And here's the black from the lower right quadrant.

What's most amazing to me is the speed with which this app does this color matching. It's pretty cool and it's pretty spot on when it's looking at an archived photo.

Ben also has an interactive color wheel as a completely separate function as well a store locator that uses the iPhone's onboard GPS. The whole package is pretty slick and packs a real technological punch into a free app. I'm very fond of Sherwin-Williams and I specify colors from their palette more than any other. With that said though, I declare Benjamin Moore's ben the winner of the iPhone app paint specifier battle.

Hats off to both companies for their embrace of new technology and I can't wait to see what's next. Finally, I'll pose the question again: what's a Blackberry?

Interior design tools for the iPhone, first up Sherwin-Williams

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece about an up-and-coming iPhone application called Ben from Benjamin Moore. Well, Ben is here and I've been using it since yesterday. Prior to Ben's arrival, Sherwin-Williams came up with a color-selecting app of their own called ColorSnap.

I've been playing with ColorSnap for about a week and here's my two cents about Sherwin-Williams' first dive into the iPhone pool. I'll review Ben tomorrow.

When you launch ColorSnap, it loads pretty quickly and flashes through a short series of photographs matched with a Sherwin-Williams color. The home screen arrives shortly thereafter and it's ready for action.

There are two buttons on the home page, Camera and Library. Library will take you to the photos you've already loaded onto your phone and Camera launches the iPhone's camera. I can't imagine how that could be made any simpler.

So say you have an aerial view of a Bahamian beach loaded onto your phone and you want to come up with a color scheme based on the photo. ColorSnap opens a copy of your archived photo. Once it's been imported, you can zoom and crop the image how you'd like. The you point to (literally) whatever color you'd like to have matched. It takes a second or two, but ColorSnap will pull the closest Sherwin-Williams color it can find and match it to your photo. In the photo above, the cursor was placed somewhere over the water and ColorSnap matched it with SW6516, Down Pour. If you agree with the match, then ColorSnap will assemble a three-color palette based on the first color it matched. The three-color palette is automatic and you can't control the secondary or tertiary colors in the palette. Hmmm.

If you click on any of the colors in the sample palette, ColorSnap jumps to a screen with the RGB formulas for the three colors in the palette. Considering RGB is the color system used for video and web color, I don't understand why RGB since we're talking about paint. I don't care about Red, Green and Blue light when I'm thinking about paint. When it comes to paint I want to see a pigment formula. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

With all of that said, once you get to a three-color palette you like, you can save it to a collection.

Once saved, you can come back to your collection whenever you'd like.

The final function ColorSnap is Find Store. Find Store uses the iPhone's GPS to locate the closest Sherwin-Williams location to wherever you are. This function works perfectly and that's more than I can say for the rest of the app unfortunately.

In ColorSnap's defense, the Capture function is limited by the fact that it's relying on a camera in a phone. The app does a better job with the Library function. As a test, I took a photo of an actual Sherwin-Williams color swatch and tried to get ColorSnap to identify it. The app failed miserably. Again, that is as much the fault of the camera as it is the app. However, if it can't recognize one of its own colors, how would it do if I were trying to coordinate a room color with a carpet or a tile? This is an app that doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.

I get the feeling from using ColorSnap that design professionals are not the target audience for this app. I mean, I don't need a color specifying tool that automatically assigns three-color palettes. I doubt I'll be whipping this app out when I'm in a quandary about how to paint a room. Although it will make my nieces and nephews ooh and ahh.

Even so, it's a pretty interesting first attempt. Sherwin-Williams was the first paint company to get a specifying tool into the app store. This application is the first step down a long road that's going to change everything we know about everything. But that's just the early adopter in me speaking. If they decide to develop it into something meaningful, this is a good first step. For now though, ColorSnap is interesting for what it represents more than for what it can do. You can download ColorSnap on Sherwin-Williams' website or you can find it in the App Store on iTunes.