Palette
Creator
A beloved-but-broken tool for a regional paint brand, rebuilt to be usable, responsive, and shareable.
A tool for picking colors that made picking a color frustrating.
To mimic the in-store chip wall, the Flash tool rendered swatches at roughly life size, far too small to reliably click. A tool whose entire purpose was picking colors had made picking a color frustrating.
And Flash itself was on its way out: locked out of the mobile web, awkward on tablets, a liability for a tool meant to just work.
Two verbs that mattered.
Explore the full line of colors, build palettes on the fly, and send them to whoever needed to see them.
Browse and compare the full Kelly Moore color line, and assemble your own palettes the way you’d pull chips off a display wall.
Send a finished palette to a partner, a contractor, or a client, the thing a shelf of paper chips could never do.
Same need, two new audiences.
A play to expand past the existing base into the two groups most likely to explore, share, and come back.
Builders & contractors
Bulk buyers, the mainstay of the company for decades.
Homeowners
Often flying solo and overwhelmed before they start. They want to explore, compare, and get a second opinion before committing.
Interior designers
Color is central to the job and client time is scarce. They need a fast, low-friction way to put ideas in front of a client, the audience most likely to use it repeatedly.
Two beliefs we designed around.
Consumers want to explore and share colors beforethey buy. Color is a high-anxiety, high-consensus decision, people don’t like making it alone.
Designers can turn a slow back-and-forth into a quick visual conversation, sharing color ideas with clients without overwhelming them.
What actually has to live inside a chip?
The answer came from the store. A physical paint chip carries exactly three things, the ones a customer references, writes down, and asks for at the counter.
Then the digital chip had to do the two things paper can’t, save the palette and email it.That’s the real upgrade over a shelf of chips.
Make the chips bigger.
Keep the wall-of-chips metaphor. Drop the real-world fidelity that killed it. The simplest possible move, and the one that forced a rework of the entire layout.
Too small to click
Swatches sized for a wall and a hand, unusable on a screen.
Comfortable to click
Sized for a screen and a cursor, usable on any device.
Once the chips were sized for a screen, everything around them could be redesigned to actually work.
Three constraints, wireframed and spec’d.
Max four colors per palette, compose and compare exactly that set. Text lives in one predictable spot (disclaimer, sort, collections), cheap to build. And it had to be fully responsive, wireframed at 900px and 640px, a novel demand at the time.
Page-by-page callouts documenting how palettes are built, what each chip carries, what the color-detail overlay shows, and what save and email do, tight enough to hand to engineering on a fast agency timeline.
Traction built and launched it from the wireframes and specs.
Live on desktop and mobile: the store-wall chip grid, a color-detail card carrying each color’s name and number, a running “My Palette” rail capped at four, and Create · Save · Email actions.
A fast, resource-light turnaround forced real compromises, full online saving was scoped as a later phase. The first release saved locally.
The explore-save-share loop, working.
The rebuild delivered the behavior it existed to enable: visitors could explore real Kelly Moore colors, save the palettes they liked, and share them, a fast, resource-light tool that did its one job well.
Traction credited the larger brand program the Palette Creator was one part of with 10%+ sales growth two years runningand a significant increase in traffic across Kelly Moore’s web properties, the program overall, not the tool alone.
Rebuilding an existing app into a new platform can be harder than building from scratch.
A rescue hands you a set of decisions someone else already made (some load-bearing, some quietly broken) and asks you to tell them apart. Most of the value was the judgment about what to keep, what to enlarge, and what to throw away. Then writing it down clearly enough that a new stack could carry the good part forward.