The release of a new iPhone App is sure to please graphic designers, decorators and artists who work with Pantone colors. Pantone has been the industry standard in color for many years, but carrying around a Pantone book full of color palettes hasn’t always been practical. And they’re expensive books to lose, too. Pantone LLC has launched myPANTONE, a digital app for iPhones that gives designers more flexibility when choosing and working with Pantone palettes.
“myPANTONE marries the power of the iPhone with the inspiration of Pantone Color Palettes, enabling designers to be creative whenever inspiration strikes them,” said Andy Hatkoff, vice president of technology licensing for Pantone. “Providing a digital, portable design studio and essential color tools at their fingertips, myPANTONE gives designers the freedom to access Pantone Colors anywhere, without the need to be in their office or carry around cumbersome guides.”
Hatkoff said with myPANTONE’s Portable Color Memory, designers no longer need to struggle to recall an exact color.
myPANTONE gives designers access to all the Pantone Color Libraries, including the Pantone Matching System (PMS) for coated, uncoated and matte stock; the Pantone Goe System for coated and uncoated stock; Pantone Pastels for coated and uncoated stock; and the Pantone Fashion + Home Smart Color System. The application lets designers create harmonious color palettes by finding complementary, analogous and triadic combinations for selected colors.
Hatkoff said myPANTONE uses the iPhone’s built-in camera to allow designers to capture whatever inspires them – from architecture and street scenes to fashion and nature. Colors can be extracted from any photo on the iPhone and then matched to the closest Pantone colors.
The beauty of a digital version of the Pantone palettes is that once they’re created, users can share their color choices and combinations with other iPhone users and automatically post notification of new palettes to Facebook and Twitter, attaching text notes and voice annotations to palettes when posting.
Designers with impatient clients can email their color choices to clients as color patches, or as application-ready swatch files for use in design applications including Adobe Creative Suite, CorelDraw and QuarkXPress.
Sharing with other designers is easy using the Pantone-hosted Website.
Each color swatch in myPANTONE includes sRGB, HTML and L*a*b* values. Additionally, myPANTONE makes cross-referencing color capabilities simple for users to find similar colors among the various Pantone Color Libraries.
myPANTONE is available for download at the Apple iPhone App Store for USD$9.99. myPANTONE is compatible with iPhone OS 3.0 or higher, and can be used on the iPhone or iPod Touch.