MyPantone review

We review myPantone, an iPhone app that is all about colour

Pantone never ceases to amaze us. Somehow it's managed to create a monopoly on colour, which in our eyes is akin to licensing the use of oxygen. What the company does is actually very useful, though, and the myPantone iPhone app is a portable extension of its services.

Pantone, for those that don't know what it does, basically invents colours. It also ensures colours remain the same and that the colour you want is used wherever you want it.

For instance, if you were printing a poster with a certain red colour in mind and the printed result was a different red, you wouldn't be best pleased. Pantone offers access to a massive reference library of colours and each one has an individual code so you can use it, time and time again.

This might seem obvious but you don't necessarily see the same red as somebody else. And that same red may look different on your screen and another. In fact, the iPhone you use to view the app will portray colours slightly differently from another device. This is why screens designed for graphics work need to be highly accurate with colour representation and why Ezio can charge many thousands of pounds for displays with unparallelled colour accuracy.

To put it simply, like in maths there are rules, like one equals one and two plus two is four. Pantone has written the rules of colour and so it's become the norm.

MyPantone condenses the entire colour library into an app. It also allows you to find out what a colour is, which is arguably its most useful feature. As the image below demonstrates, we've taken a picture of a blue mug and the app has given us a list of all the colours in the photo.

Each of the colours has a code so we could use it to ensure if we made another blue mug it is the same colour. You get a code for its lab, sRGB and HTML colour as well as its pantone code. The app also tells you which colours are its harmonies or cross-references if you need to find colours that will go with it.

Whilst an image is displayed you can drag your finger over to find particular colours and the nearest alternatives. From here you can again get all the colour information you need. You can also swap between fan decks for different groups of colours, with the results of each match changing with the new selection.

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Once you've found the colour you want all over your wall or adorning the top of your website, you can link your Facebook account to upload it there. Alternatively, tweeters can link to the colour on Twitter. Both of these may be useful to keen social networkers but the rest of the sharing options will prove more useful.

You can email, share, print and send the colour or pallette to another via what we assume is Bluetooth - we couldn't get any other devices to appear - which is going to be more useful in a working environment, unless you like tweeting your clients with colour suggestions.

Other features of the app include view in layout, a way of looking at the colours on a virtual white board and pallette details, a way of adding your location to a selection of colours.

With its built-in use of the iPhone's camera, myPantone is incredibly good at telling you what colour is what and it's got a plethora of features to either tell you or others about each one.

It's not quite perfect, though. Going back to an earlier point, colours are only as accurate as the displays you view them from. In the case of the iPhone, without a way of calibrating colours to ensure they are accurate it's difficult to know how what each colour looks like. That doesn't stop it from being useful as a way of finding out about one but it does make going through the fandeck to find your perfect orange a bit pointless.

The price is also quite steep but Pantone isn't known for giving its colours away for cheap so it's expected. So if you only intend on using the app once for one colour query it's not exactly cheap. However, if you are into design either as a hobby or professionally, or perhaps you find yourself wanting to match colours on a regular basis, £6.99 isn't too bad. It's two beers at London prices.

We would've liked to have seen some sort of introduction into Pantone itself for curious newbies but that's not really a big problem when the internet is awash with helpful souls - and hopefully this review has given you some sort of clue.

Ultimately, MyPantone is an app that backs up its premium cost with premium features and a slick user interface.

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