Sherwin-Williams ColorSnap
ColorSnap lets anyone visualize a paint color in a real room and pull color inspiration from a photo — matched to the full Sherwin-Williams palette. I built the first native Android version.
Overview
ColorSnap is Sherwin-Williams’ color companion — the app that turns “what would this wall look like in a different color?” into something you can answer in seconds. While at IBM iX, I built the first native Android version of ColorSnap, bringing the experience that had lived on iOS to millions of Android devices.
The challenge
Choosing paint is hard precisely because color is so context-dependent: the same swatch reads differently in your hallway than it does on a fan deck. The brief was to take Sherwin-Williams’ enormous color library and make it tangible — to let someone see a color in their own space, or lift a color they love out of a photo, without any specialized hardware. And it had to feel native and fast on the wide range of Android phones of the era.
What I built
- Capture color from a photo. Tap anywhere in any image and ColorSnap finds the color under your finger and matches it to the nearest real Sherwin-Williams paint color — turning a sunset, a fabric, or a favorite mug into a usable palette.
- Paint a photo. Working with a server-side image API, the app could “repaint” the walls in a photo with any color in the library, so you could preview a room before committing a single brushstroke.
- The full color library — browse, search, and explore 1,500+ Sherwin-Williams colors and curated collections.
- Save and share palettes, then take them straight to a store to buy the paint.
The result
ColorSnap put a paint studio in your pocket on Android for the first time, and became a flagship piece of Sherwin-Williams’ digital color toolkit — the same lineage the brand still builds on today. It remains one of my favorite kinds of projects: a genuinely useful tool wrapped around a big, messy, real-world problem.