I sourced a range of colour cards, guides and charts from the interior paint industry’s leading brands, incuding Farrow & Ball, Little Greene, Designers Guild, Fired Earth, Dulux and Crown.
I found that the paint guides provided by these brands all took one of two forms: a concertina format card or alternatively a booklet format.
The more premium brands (Farrow & Ball, Little Greene, Designers Guild and Fired Earth) all used almost identical formats for the presentation of their colour collections - the concertina format. These charts/guides expand, allowing the brands’ entire range of colours to be seen at once, as well as having the ability to be explored as a book by selectively opening the folded sections. Colours in each of these are typically small chips of painted card, stuck down within a grid formation in columns of two per page/fold.
Dulux and Crown, the more standard brands, both use simple A5, saddle stiched booklets to present their colours, usually following exploration of current interior design trends. The colours in these are simply digitally printed in a grid formation on one page per colour group.
While the concertina format used by the premium brands considers at least some functionality in comparison to standard booklets, neither allow consumers to use the guides in such a way that they can create schemes, match colours with other interior considerations, or simply view an individual colour unaffected by those so closey surrounding them. They do not consider the consumer or provide a practical aid to the colour selection process. The rigidity of these guides limits the creative potentials of the interior decoration process, while also providing little information on how to choose colours and make informed decisions regarding the maximisation of a room’s potential. They do not communicate the various methods and approaches to decoration.
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