While other children played ball in the sunlight, an asthmatic youth remained indoors filling drawing pads with caricatures. Immersed in a surreptitious artistic world by virtue of health and inherited talent, this child excelled in art classes throughout grade school.
Public school teachers annually repeated the mantra of primary, secondary, tertiary and complementary colors. The color wheel opened up new opportunities to explore relationships between hues. Growing into adolescence, early childhood asthma became a memory as faint as professional ball playing prospects. Early on, this youth was destined to become a full-fledged artist and color expert.
Then came the shock of discovering primary colors in offset printing are not the red, blue and yellow taught in grade school. Red is actually made from magenta and yellow! A Pantone color guide brings back warm and fuzzy feelings -- removing swatches to tape together palettes. Decades later, color perception has been distilled to mathematical computations. You want a nice gold? Try 15c 30m 90y. Not bright enough? How about this 15m 100y cadmium yellow? And look at all the color spaces we now navigate -- CMYK, RGB, Lab and hexadecimal.
From sign painting, to print shops, an art museum to product package design firm and numerous advertising agencies, hand lettering to technical illustration, graphic design to digital service bureaus, the yellow bricked long and winding road was filled with artistic color. This capricious walk down memory lane was inspired, interestingly enough, by an iPhone app.
The color wheel is back!
It has been a long time since spinning a cardboard color wheel. Authored by developers of the Macintosh desktop Swiss-Army knife for designers: Art Director's Toolkit, Color Expert has the potential for turning an iPhone into a ten-dollar Pantone ColorMunki Design environment. Color Expert brings back the nostalgia of the simple color wheel while crunching numbers to form digital color palettes in a fun and interactive environment.
Within days of attending a color management seminar where ColorMunki Design software was demonstrated, I serendipitously found myself clicking through Color Expert screenshots. Thinking this was too good to be true, I downloaded it, worked my way through the interface with no provided documentation and then emailed the developer with questions.
From the main window, select "Color Wheel." Three circular buttons surround the wheel. Clockwise from the upper left, press to take a snapshot with the iPhone camera; the next circle toggles lock/unlock of the color wheel; the third is used to sample colors from an image. Tapping "Options" to select how Color Expert builds palettes.
After the user selects a Key color, Color Expert builds a palette of colors based on the chosen color wheel. Edit brightness of colors by rotating the wheel or dragging circles appearing on the wheel to and from the center. Change brightness with the horizontal slider or rotate the unlocked wheel to alter hues. Palettes can be saved and opened by clicking the "Options" button. A saved palette that depicts RGB and Hex formulas can be emailed.
In version 1.0 it is possible to sample the Key color from newly snapped photos, higher resolution images in your iPhone photo library, basic swatches, RGB sliders or traditional and Goe iterations of the Pantone library. Version 1.1 promises managed CMYK colors, emailing Adobe Swatch Exchange (ASE) files, lockable Key color and other enhancements. The latter version will truly be a game changer.
When a customer asks for a new color palette, true enough you can use Color Expert to sample colors from a stock photo. But why not get outdoors? Go to the beach, climb mountains or visit a flower garden as research. Develop palettes at your favorite coffee shop instead of cooped up in the house. Virtues of the Pantone Color Cue and ColorMunki are now within the reach of the iPhone -- a device people actually carry with them when on the road and in client meetings.
UPDATE: As of May 26, 2009 version 1.1 has yet to be released with all of its promised features. The iPhone 3.0 OS and new iPhones are expected within the next month. Since color matching is largely dependent upon the quality of photos, right now best results are achieved by importing color balanced photos from your computer. A new iPhone model may include a better camera and the 3.0 OS could be the holdup for integrating the highly anticipated Color Expert features.