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?

Here's a great new blog

I believe in the blogosphere, I really do. When I started a year-and-a-half ago I knew absolutely nothing about any of this. I'd go as far as to say that I'd never read a blog until I started my own. I figured it out eventually and I have learned more in this brief time than I thought was possible. More exciting than what I already know is what I'll learn as I continue down this path. Where's it lead? Who knows and who cares? I have met some amazing people in the last year-and-a-half and networking with other bloggers has to be the best part of this whole exercise. Between my readers and the other bloggers I know, I feel plugged into something here and that's pretty darn cool if you ask me.

Another highlight is when I get the chance to help out someone who's starting a new blog. With that said, my dear friend Kevin has started a new blog he's calling The Restless Sybarite. Kevin's also moving to New Orleans in two days and following his adjustment to that strangely enchanting city promises to be a non-stop thrill ride.

So please pop over and visit with my friend Kevin. Keep going back to so you can witness first hand the making of a new, New Orleanian.

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.

Enter to win a design classic from All Modern

So even though my Bertoia stools aren't going to happen, my pals at All Modern still like me. So much so that they want to do a give away with Kitchen and Residential Design. Here it is:

This is Michael Graves' 9093 Kettle (the big one) and this is what we're giving away.

Michael Graves' New Americana collection for Alessi from 1985 grew out of his dissatisfaction with Modernist expression. In a series of experiments to help him find a newer design vocabulary, he turned a Postmodernist eye to every day objects. His New Americana collection was an over night sensation and it brought the work of an already-famous architect and product designer into the homes of people worldwide.

Graves' pairing his iconographic sensibilities with Alessi is a perfect match. Alessi's entire raison d’être is to re-imagine every day objects. Graves' career is marked by his embrace of a studied whimsy and I love him for it. That same studied whimsy is at the root of my passion for all things Alessi too. I'm pretty thrilled to have the chance to bring some of the serious fun into someone else's life through this give away.

All Modern carries most of Alessi's collections by the way, so give them a look-see. Alessi proves that Modern design can be both a serious art form and a whole lot of fun.

So it's pretty simple. All you need to do is leave a comment after this post and I'll draw a winner at random next Sunday, 14 June. There aren't any magic words to repeat or assignments to complete for this one. All I'm looking for is a comment. Good luck!

All modern from All Modern

It's my job to echo and interpret the design sensibilities of my clients. Because of that, I spend a lot of time putting together rooms that aren't really my style. Don't get me wrong, I put together some great rooms but I generally don't work on spaces that would make me happy personally. That's fine and as it should be, people don't pay me to recreate my dream home.

With that said, every once in a while I get to work on a project that does appeal to me personally and I'm working on one right now. The clients in question have a good-humored approach to life and to their home and they appreciate modern design. These people a find and it's an honor to work on their home.

Pretty early into the process, I specified four Bertoia counter stools that were supposed to go with a rather large bar I had in mind for the back of a particularly large island. Here are the Bertoia counter stools I was lobbying for.

These Bertoias are part of a collection of similar seating designed by Italian sculptor Harry Bertoia in 1952. This collection was designed for Knoll originally and Knoll still makes the same collection. The Knoll Company was founded in 1938 by Hans and Florence Knoll and it's still making 20th century originals.

Mies van der Rohe, Florence Knoll, Eero Saarinen, Isamu Noguchi, Frank Gehry, Maya Lin, Marcel Breuer and of course Harry Bertoia had and have collections produced by the modern masters at Knoll. Looking though their catalogs is like a stroll through the 20th century. World War II was a lot more destructive socially than most people think and in the years during and immediately after it, everything was up for grabs. In a lot of ways, Modernism was a reaction to the social upheavals of that terrible conflict.

Modernism came about alongside the rise of the middle class in the West and the two forces fed and sustained one another. Modernist designers were committed to getting designed furnishings into the hands of the masses and the masses could suddenly afford it. Companies like Knoll bridged that gap then and continue to do so now.

So let's get back to my clients. When the time came to order the Bertoia counter stools I had my heart set on, my clients balked. They have kids, young pre-teens, and they didn't want to spend the money on furniture that was going to get kicked around by a room full of 10-year-old boys. They're going for a cheap knock off instead. Ugh. My first impulse is to tell them to get the good stuff and just tell the kids they're not allowed to sit on them until they're older. Can you tell I don't have any kids? Hah! But I let it go. They did however, sign off on this amazing light fixture by Sonneman.

I love this light fixture enough to make up for the missing Bertoias in this finished room. Almost.

So had we gone ahead with the Bertoias, they would have come from Boston-based All Modern. All Modern has the full Knoll Collection and they offer free, same day shipping on select Knoll items. All Modern carries all of the greats who make up the entire Modernist movement. Herman Miller, Steelcase, Luce Plan, Louis Poulsen, Hansgrohe, George Kovacs, Droog, Artemide, Artecnica, Kartell and my beloved Alessi swell that website to the point of near bursting. Got an ache for some modernism? Scratch it at All Modern.