Color Strategies, LLC

A Paint Color DNA Table subscriber emailed because she thought this swatch was wrong.

Entirely possible.

We have 16,000 paint colors ➡️ typos happen ➡️ figured she'd found one.

She just knee-jerk emailed, didn't bother to Google, because the name implied a deep, muted, purple/red.

The "plum" part does. She didn't consider the "hog" part.

Hog plum is a tropical fruit and F&B's interpretation of the color is spot on.

Hog Plum - the paint color - has what I like to call "decisive chroma". Coming in at 5 on the Munsell Chroma scale.

Chroma - the number - gives you a heads up about how colorful or neutral a color looks.

We have Colorographies for all 16,000 colors from 14 paint brands in the Table because they literally draw a picture of a color's attributes.

Colorography is just one of the tools we use to make color legible. If the fact that color is quantifiable bends your brain, you can just look at the picture.

Farrow & Ball has some of the most unconventional color names, this one’s named after a fruit, and it tracks. Got the photo from iStock, it's perfect.

Many years ago, an artist and educator told me that color notations were “mumbo jumbo”. Meaning measurement was somehow divorced from the experience of seeing.

Then she talked about the active learning she does with her students using the amazing Color-aid papers; she ordered them every year.

So, I asked her a simple question: “How do you think they send you the same colors… every year?”

Silence. 😶

That's when I realized many don't know what it means to measure color or what color models are modeling.

If you don't know, color models model us -- the human vision system. The science is simply the "shorthand" that allows us to capture, communicate, and reproduce the fabulousness of color.

If it exists, it has been measured.

It's a box of Color-aid papers and a box of CIELAB values.

Both are true at the same time.

👉Color Strategist Certification + Paint Color DNA Table available now at thelandofcolor.com

Today's Color Note: Guessing is not a strategy.

The clock runs out. A decision has to be made.

So you do what most people do - you default to your best guess.

If you guess wrong, you know it's not "just paint". It's time, money, project momentum, and your confidence takes a hit too.

It doesn't have to be that way.

The Patented Color Strategy System™ transforms color from a guessing game into structured decisions you can explain and defend.

👉Color Strategist Certification + Paint Color DNA Table available now at thelandofcolor.com