An App For Your Home Decorating Toolbox

Interior decorating projects often require a weekend at the home improvement store. But PPG Industries has designed a way to select paint colors without collecting piles of sample chips. Its desktop and mobile application ColorClix—a CIO 100 Award winner—lets you follow your inspiration, whether it’s from a magazine, a photograph or a TV show. Upload an image to ColorClix, and the app matches it to a palette of paint colors. You can see what a color would look like in a room using ColorClix Visualizer and share it with family and friends over social media. When it’s time to buy, a calculator in the app helps you figure out how many gallons to order. Chris Caruso, PPG’s global business IT director, says the company, which makes Olympic paint for Lowe’s, wants to expand the app to help customers with the whole of their design projects—suggesting furniture and household items, and offering decorating tips. “We want to create a road map that goes beyond selecting color.”