The Challenge
What Mixmatch Color Was Facing
Mixmatch Color needed to provide accurate colour matching across paint manufacturer product ranges by integrating with APIs and data feeds from seven different paint manufacturers — each exposing colour data in different formats, using different colour space specifications (Lab, sRGB, Munsell), and with different approaches to metamerism and finish variants. Design tool import/export formats (Figma tokens, Adobe Swatch Exchange, Pantone references) added a further layer of format complexity. Without accurate colour space conversion between all sources, recommended paint matches were visually inaccurate in physical application.
The Solution
What We Built
We built a colour data normalisation layer with per-manufacturer API adapters that ingested colour specifications and converted them to a canonical Lab colour space model using manufacturer-supplied spectral data where available. A colour matching engine computed perceptual distance (Delta-E 2000) between queried colours and all indexed paint products, with metamerism risk flags for matches that would appear different under different light sources. Export adapters converted matched colours back to the format required by each target design tool. A sync scheduler kept manufacturer colour databases current, detecting product changes and new colour introductions through comparison against previous snapshots.
Results