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 colorsper 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.