he device works through an internal spherical light source, which picks up the surface color in a controlled sequence and sends the reflected light to an integrated color sensor. A flash of a green light lets you know the process is done. Then the Cube can store the color in its onboard memory—it can keep track of up to 20 colors—or send it to a Bluetooth-paired iOS or Android device.
The SwatchMate Cube has uses for anyone who is visually creative, but it's especially useful for those who frequently hop between the digital and and the actual. For example, fashion designers can check color variance in samples, and graphic and web designers can use real-world inspiration as a jumping-off point. Color is even important to coffee blenders, and the Cube can help a coffee blend fit in among already known varieties.
With everyone perceiving color a little differently, and some more precisely than others, the Cube also helps you keep projects continuous—for example, graffiti artists can seamlessly extend their work.
The colors captured by the SwatchMate cube are matched to a wide variety of color palettes in paints, markers, pens, and more; by using Cube Link and linking the cube to Photoshop, you also get a host of digital color profiles available to you, including ANPA-COLOR, DIC Color Guide, FOCOLTONE, HKS swatches, PANTONE, TOYO Color Finder 1050, and TRUMATCH. And of course, natively in the phone app, SwatchMate supports all the standard color spaces for raw color values, such as RGB and CMYK.
A device like this bridges the gap between the colors we see naturally and the constructed colors we spend time looking at on computer screens. In that way, it helps designers, decorators, and everyone in between shuttle, as they increasingly must, between those two worlds.