The motivation I had to create Find-a-Paint is probably quite similar to your motivation for visiting and potentially using it. Last year, I was planning on re-decorating my room and was in the process of choosing a paint colour for some wooden panelling around my desk. I was after a dark green with a slight brown tinge, as was fashionable at the time. I'd managed to find a few examples, but I wanted to compare them side by side, so using some basic design software I took samples of the hexadecimal codes of the paints from their labels and laid them side by side.

As it turns out, if you place colours next to each other which look similar in isolation, they appear completely different, so I never actually decided. Whilst the idea for a paint matching software came a few weeks after this, I feel that the process of matching paint colours based on their hex code originated from this. That evening I decided to pilot the idea and photographed some of the painted walls of my house and compared these to the hex codes of some visually similar colours provided on the manufacturer's website. The matches were fairly close, but allowing more indirect light, either artificial or natural, improved the accuracy of the photo samples.

I kept tweaking the light levels of the room until I was satisfied with the accuracy of the match. Over the next few months, I gathered the product information from the websites of our supported brands, wrote the code and created the user interface. Find-a-Paint was born and continues to provide thousands of monthly users with accurate matches, allowing them to paint with confidence in knowing how their chosen colour will look.

Thanks for using our application. If there's anything you need, or if you'd like to provide us with feedback, please do get in touch via our contact page. We'd love to hear it!

Callum McCarthy, Founder

P.S. As it turns out, I still haven't re-decorated my room…