Project Overview

COLOUR TO THE PEOPLE
Kolormondo is your GPS for colour. This 3D colour globe is intuitive and immediatly useful to both beginners and professionals, people matching colours at home, designers in fashion, interiors and graphics etc. It is also a tool for colour training, from kindergarten to university.

THE CONCEPT: COLOURS IN A GLOBE
Planet Earth is not a flat map, it is a 3D globe. The same goes for colour; To be understood, colour needs to be presented in 3D.
In Kolormondo, the colour circle is situated around the equator. Going north, colours get lighter, meeting in the white North Pole. Going south, they darken. At the core, colours meet in grey.
The concept is inspired by Runge, Goethe, Munsell and Itten.

Organisation

Kolormondo

Team

Nicoline Kinch
Sara Strand
Jonas Ahnmé
Daniel Bjugård

Project Brief

Desgners, artists and colour users from all over the world praise Kolormondo:

"As an artist I was enthralled with the intuitive color selection tool you've created, particularly the three dimensional spherical construct"
Robert Greenberg, 20 year multimedia producer & Emmy Award winner. www.inbobwetrust.com

"One of the smartest products I’ve seen during the Milan Design Week 2014. A useful tool for designers".
Riccardo Capuzzo, founder of Design42Day, juror for Red Dot Award

"I use your Kolormondo in my courses about colors, it is so easy to understand an so helpful for students".
Racha GHARIRI, Architecte-coloriste, M.A.B Département d'architecture, Université de Mostaganem-Algérie

"Congratulations, Kolormondo, on the ingenuity of your colour model". Lindsay W. MacDonald, London, Research engineer in colour image science. Co-editor of eight books on colour image science

Project Innovation/Need

Colour is crucial in almost all creative processes. And yet, colour is difficult, confusing and challenging. Just one aspect: There is digital colour, RGB, and printed colour, CMYK. Then there are different brands of colour systems, like Pantone, RAL and NCS. And there is official standard, like CIELab.

Kolormondo provides a starting-point, an "ABC-book",immediatly demonstrating the common grounds of all colour systems: the 3 dimensions of colour; hue, value and saturation. It serves as a bridge between both the expert and the amateur and between the different systems.

Kolormondo is also a beautiful, inspiring object to decorate a home, an office or a public place.

The Kolormondo app, free of charge in App Store and Google Play builds on the same concept and is also a pedagogical tool for finding, choosing and matching colour.

Design Challenge

Our major design challenge was to have the curage to show such a simple model.... WE felt the need for it, but would the market do the same? Who is the market for basic colour understanding? We orginally aimed it for amateurs and children, but it turns out it is being used by highly professional people like designers, researchers and teachers in universitites, and for the production of fashion, paint, cosmetics etc in big global companies.

The benefit is exactly the simplicity.The aha-moments and "why did not anybody do this before"-comments are many.

Another challenge was the choice between the physical and the digital world. Being able to actually touch and build and turn the world of colour seemed crucial. But on the other hand, the digital possibilities are endless and attractive. We decided to do both, wich has turned out a success. Both are needed.

Thirdly: how to materialize the concept with reasonable costs (printing colour with high quality on 3d objects is difficult)? This is solved by using flat pieces that the user puts together herself, thereby also getting a hands-on experience of colour relationships.

Sustainability

By being more knowledgable about colour, the consumer is likely to stay satisfied longer with clothes, furniture etc.

Similarly, in the production chane, so many costly mistakes are done (costly in economic as well as environmental aspect) are done, in particular due to lack of colour knowledge.

So Kolormondo, being primarily a knowledge mission, aims at lowering production costs and increase the longevity of products.

We have kept production in Europe (Sweden and Germany).