Being a furniture designer calls for creativity, precision and endless shots of espresso. While designing our furniture collections, our designers not only create an original product, but they must envision how it will look and feel in various interior projects, from the drawing board to finishing touches. This means concentrating not only on the functionality of the design but also on the aesthetic – what shape and style will go best with certain fabrics and fabric colors to best compliment both the interior project and the design itself.
When choosing upholstery textiles and project color schemes, every designer may see and interpret the spectrum differently. What may seem as a popular sea foam green to some, may be shown as mint to others. Sometimes color balancing and envisioning how the colors look together can be a challenge. This is where Pantone’s new mobile color app, Pantone Studio, comes in to save the day – or shall we say, project! Pantone Studio gives designers a seamless way to capture colors from a variety of sources. It is a comprehensive mobile color tool and application that converts images from it’s own extensive library of image or images captured by an iPhone camera into color values that reside alongside Pantone’s own RGB, HEX and CMYK numbered hues. Here is an example of a beautiful image taken from Pantone Studio’s image library showing how the app extracts color values and provides choices.
Images inside the app to help identify hue and relationships between hues |
Color bar for selection, choose any one and go deeper into the hue |
Example of selecting color Pantone 17-1456 TCX Tigerlily (Orange) |
More useful tools for Pantone Tigerlily – share, upload to photoshop, or to the cloud |
Pantone Studio allows designers to view images captured on their devices—whether found or self-initiated—through the lens of color, allowing them to build their own library of hues in tandem with Pantone’s, test them on personal digital projects, and share them via social media.
What this means for us as designers and why we are thrilled by it, is we now have the appropriate tool to document our inspiration running wild. Regardless of our muse, we are able to snap photos of what inspires us, and grab the color directly from the photo and create our own color scheme for an upcoming design or project. This also helps us share the colors with you as a design lover. We can share exactly what the color scheme will look like together and what the final piece will look like in the specified color.
Pantone Studio has helped us in our creative process by providing a tool to extract color from imagery. So often, we gather photos and images of our travel that are filled with rich colors. This app accesses your camera roll and can extract colors for you. Awesome! Once you grab that color, you can send to the cloud, send to Photoshop or share it. Here’s an example of some taken from Tina Nicole’s camera roll and how the app lays out color values shown in the photos.
Original image from iPhone camera roll. |
The app scans image & shows color bar extracted from image. |
Color bar extracted from iPhone image and colors in the spectrum to consider |
Another way the app extracts color from a camera roll image for you |
So now, all those images we gather along life’s journey can be the greatest source of color inspiration with use of the Pantone Studio app. This app has opened up a whole new tool box for our designers and we think it will for you too.
Thank you for reading! We hope you found our blog useful. To keep up with the latest happenings here at Nathan Anthony, connect with us on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest.