myPANTONE: Questions, Answers and a Review

I recently had the pleasure of sending Andy Hatkoff, the Vice President, OEM and Technology Licensing at PANTONE some questions about their iPhone app myPANTONE. myPANTONE is an awesome companion for designers and creatives alike. We are excited to bring this information from behind the app and a review of the app itself.

The iPhone is a perfect platform to carry a pocket PANTONE guide, what steps have you taken to make this be the easiest way to locate and use the PANTONE colors you need?

In the development of myPANTONE, one of the key fundamentals in the design of the app and its user interface was to make it easy for the user to find the desired PANTONE colors.  To that end we have taken advantage of the iPhone’s “touchablity” with the fanned out guide view and allowing the user to move about the guide until they locate the color range they wish and then by touching the page desired bringing up a close-up few of a numerous pages and scrolling through the colors in a page view.  The idea was find the general area of color and then “zoom in” to get a closer view of the colors.  I liken this to mapping solutions that let to zoom in closer for more detail once you have the area geographic area identified. Another approach is the SEARCH function that allows the user to simply type in the PANTONE number desired.  myPANTONE will then return the colors where  those numbers are used. myPANTONE also provides color sorting in two ways (1) the standard order used in the fan guides and (2) a sort in more of a chromatic type sequence.  This make chromatic type sequence makes it simple to find, for instance all the reds or blue,  etc.

How accurate is the iPhone screen and what steps have you taken to make sure that the color displayed on screen are correct?

iPhone screens are not synonymous with color accuracy.  There are a number of limitations and issues that make accuracy of the display of colors on an iPhone a problematic.  ANY app on the iPhone that uses color to its benefit (including photo apps) suffers from the same issue – iPhones are not meant to be color accurate. There exist differences on the displays between the various versions of the iPhone. For example: the first iPhones were set to a cooler white point that made the screen whiter and bluer, while subsequent versions use a warmer color temperature and different white point.   From a developer’s point of view the Software Developer Kit (SDK) provided by Apple does not give us access to anything about the actual display except its size. At this point in time, the SDK does not offer the possibility to provide any control over the calibration of the display.  Additionally, issues such as ambient lighting and the angle from which the screen is held (and viewed) can affect the perception of color.

Because of these inherent limitations, we would caution users of myPANTONE (or any other color intensive app) should not be used to validate and approve color.  MyPANTONE is a creative tool and not a production tool. It allows users  to capture the idea of color with a wonderful mobile device  that is used broadly in the design community. The user of myPANTONE  can select a color and play with it, amend it and use it as inspiration in the design process. That’s what myPANTONE was developed for; and it is what you can expect of an iPhone app. A PANTONE Color guide should ALWAYS be used for an accurate representation of a color in a print environment, regardless of whether you used an app or a monitor in the design process.

Creatives are on the go more and more these days especially as mobile technology is getting faster and easier to use. This app allows you to share via email, post to the myPANTONE site & send to other devices. Why is sharing and integration the best possible outcome for an app like this?

It was important for us not only to provide a way to deliver a creative tool, but also to add significant utility and shareablitity.  By taking advantage of the iPhone’s  connectivity functionality, we can e-mail a palette as not only an HTML document, but also as enclosures whereby the user created palette can used within the Adobe Creative Suite and QuarkXPress.  Getting information into the iPhone was only one half of the equation for the user experience- the other half is getting the information out of the iPhone and a way to make it useful and usable.  Through support of the popular design and page layout apps it is now possible to create a palette in your iPhone with myPANTONE and then easily integrate and use the palette in the design process.

At what point did a PANTONE app seem like a logical step?

It was clear that the paradigm for creativity was rapidly shifting from the confines of the desktop (or laptop) to a mobile environment.  The device was there waiting to be populated with tools.  In the same way that the computer is rich environment that will only become useful if  it was populated with meaningful solutions, the mobile platform of the iPhone also offered a robust canvas waiting to be inhabited with solutions that provide a rich user experience.  In focus groups and discussions with our customers, it was apparent that their creativity is was not restricted to the time they spent in front of computer.  They were seeking the freedom to be creative wherever they are and wherever they go.  The iPhone represented a great platform to untether their creativity and give them the capabilities to work with a highly portable version of the PANTONE Color Systems.

How many different variations of the current app have there been before it went to the final version?

It is hard know exactly how many concepts, wireframes and prototypes were iterated before we decided upon the current implementation.  Needless to say we wanted to take full advantage of the iPhone user experience and provide a robust app that would be not only cool but have a high degree of utility.  Our team wanted to make sure the app deployed the touchable aspects of the iPhone to full advantage and at the same time provide a visually interesting environment for a creative audience.  Obviously dealing with the size of the screen and understanding that apps need to be focused and are not just a small desktop application were challenges we had to understand.  At the end of the process, we were delighted that we had successfully married the user interface and capabilities of the iPhone platform (touch, e-mail, GPS, voice functions) with an app that is not only fun, but useful.

Now that the app has launched, is this app finished or will there always been a constant refinement of the app and pushing it into new developments and integrations?

When we were designing the myPANTONE app, we had so many more features, functions and product ideas that, rest assured, there will be ongoing enhancements to the existing product, but also a series of the other apps.  The mobile platform is an exciting way to deliver tools to our audiences.  Also, the mobile environment is part of a larger strategy where the desktop, the web and mobile will all be tied into a large Pantone ecosystems that will have a high level of interoperability and synergy.  The key is providing access and usage of the PANTONE Systems regardless of whether you are on the go, on the web or on the desktop.

The app is listed at $9.99 how does pricing weigh in to the app? Did you think of other price-points and has this one worked for you thus far?

The setting of price points provided many interesting internal discussions.  I think the market is in the formative stages whereby developers are trying to balance the original concept whereby a vast majority of apps were free.  But as the mobile platform evolves to serve as not only a delivery vehicle that is beyond games, social networking and other similar apps, there is a realization that developers can provide highly useful tools that can be monetized.  We have been extremely pleased with the response to myPANTONE.  In less than 2 months since it was launched we have over 27,000 downloads.  It is a learning experience and the customers ultimately will tell us what is working (and what is not).

The Review

myPANTONE gives you the ability to have several PANTONE colorbooks in your hand at any given place in the world. This is a perfect app for designers, Art Directors, Creative Directors, Interior Designers or anyone that has to deal with PANTONEs. myPANTONE is an amazing app to use. The app has a simple and clean user interface that is both intuitive and consistent with normal iPhone standard applications. The beautiful thing about myPANTONE is it operates like a PANTONE swatch book and you can rotates and flick through colors. This is extremely enticing if you have ever needed to leaf through a PANTONE book while you were on the go and needed something. However, this is not just for people that use PANTONE’s anyone could enjoy this app and learn new things about colors, hues and how to make a color palette.

The fundamentals are simple and the app gives you access to big and bulky swatch books with just a few flicks of your fingers. Some other awesome features are the fact that you can share your colors between your machines (that will open the colors in In-Design or Quark or CorelDraw) or to your friends. You can email the colors which is great if someone in the office is asking for a color palette or a client wants to know their PANTONE color.

myPANTONE also allows you to pull colors from a photo which is great if you are trying build a color palette from a photo for a room or a design. This feature works flawlessly. I used a very complex image and this app was able to handle it with relative ease.The only minus that I found with the app is the fact that there is not a way to see the CMYK value for a PANTONE chip. This seems a bit off to me as color books give the CMYK value. It gives the RGB but not the CMYK. Aside from that being the only feature that I could see the app was lacking, this app surpassed my expectations.

Some other features include:

• You can capture and extract colors from photos and snap to the closest PANTONE Color.

• Automatically generates harmonious color combinations

• cross-reference PANTONE colors to other PANTONE color libraries

• Email an HTML image of your palette

• Email color palettes that can be used in Adobe Creative Suite and QuarkXPress & CorelDraw

• Text & Voice annotations of palettes.

• Post notifications of new palettes to twitter and facebook

• GPS tagging of palettes

Conclusion

myPANTONE is the perfect companion for any designer/creative that needs a simple and effective mobile solution. The pricepoint of the app is $9.99 which at first seemed high to me however, if you have used any PANTONE product you know that they are not low dollar and being able to have several swatch books in one application is more than ideal instead of ordering swatch books in paper form. The app has a robust enough feature list to be listed at $9.99  and more importantly is an app that anyone can use and get a grasp on quickly and easily.

Screenshots

More Info

iTunes | Twitter | Site