Hip, New ColorMunki —Sherburne

I HAVE written before about the value of using your color expertise as a market differentiator and marketing tool. A recent announcement from our friends at Pantone potentially adds another tool to your arsenal in this regard.

ColorMunki (you have to love the name!) is a unique and affordable color management tool targeted at the design community. For many designers, the whole issue of color management as it relates to print can be somewhat of a mystery, resulting in the provision of files that may not print accurately.

ColorMunki is a tool that you can bring to the attention of your design customers—or even provide to them if it makes financial sense for you—that can go a long way toward preventing these issues and solidifying your customer relationship.

So what is ColorMunki? Color-Munki Design addresses core issues of color creation, control and communication in one easy-to-use, integrated solution that draws designers into a color-managed workflow without them even necessarily realizing it.

In a unique application of technological convergence, ColorMunki is about twice the depth of a cell phone, but otherwise about the same size. It combines the functionality of Pantone’s ColorCue—a tool that allows users to scan and recognize a color from any source—with the ability to color calibrate monitors, projectors and printers in a simple and easy-to-use interface.

Previously, a user would have had to purchase several separate tools to accomplish these tasks, learn how to use them all, and hope that they all worked together to deliver desired results. All of this at a cost of $1,000 or more, depending on the tools acquired. With ColorMunki, the user simply turns the center dial to change functions.

While this is a really cool idea, it doesn’t stop there. It comes with robust software and online resources that are really the key to the value this solution provides for you.