Hot Tip: Behr's Virtual Color Center

We've seen other virtual paint tools before but since we have been looking for a new color for our bedroom, this one has consumed a great deal of our time. Hate second guessing yourself when it comes to accent colors? Well no more with Behr's Colorsmart process. Click through to see how it all works...

To start, head over to Behr's website. Next we clicked on "Explore With Color Smart" and went into their "Virtual Color Center" section. From there the site allows us to pick several colors and it provides a wealth of information about the colors and finishes we chose. It's definately a great way to kill a little time on a Monday where we are still wishing it was the weekend and procrastinating a little of our work.

Here's a few highlights from the Behr website:

Enhanced Interface: Overhauled with the consumer in mind, the new site is easy to use and easy to navigate. Drop down menus organize information into an easy-to-follow format.

Virtual Color Center: Replicates the retail experience for online visitors. Do-it-yourselfers are able to browse color cards, color families, stripe cards and product brochures.

My Color Samples: Using color hotspots, visitors can collect the rich and dynamic hues used throughout the site and save them to a Workbook for future projects or add them to a Shopping Cart to purchase samples.

Inspiration Gallery: Wide-format, magazine-quality images draw the eye in and inspire visitors to do more with color. The new site also gives visitors the opportunity to spark their imagination with expert style, design and color advice from the experts at BEHR.

Sheen Selector: First-of-its-kind interactive sheen tool lets customers see the reflective value of different sheens, allowing them to select the most appropriate product for their home decorating project.

User-friendly Product Categories: Product detail pages offer consumers a wealth of information from product descriptions to safety information to related products.

Robust How-To Section: Easy-to-read and easy-to-follow, includes preparation and clean up guides, step-by-step instructions, how-to images, recommended BEHR products and suggested equipment.

Thanks Charles and Hudson for the headsup about a fun new online tool!

Comments (8)

Behr has had similar tools in local Home Depot stores, too, but they're often tied up on weekend visits. The online tool adds convenience. If you're wondering what colors to start with, you might find the Color Marketing Group's 2009 forecast helpful. I've copied it onto my blog, and added some pictures to illustrate the points:

http://jgkitchens.blogspot.com/2009/01/trend-watch-2009-colors-to-come.html

I'm a huge, huge fan of this. When we painted our house it was all we could do to select a single color that we agreed on, so the thought of coordinating other colors was fairly daunting. The Color Center gives you up to eight choices, three of which we always seemed to hate immediately, leaving us with a very manageable five color options. If not for this, I promise you our house would never have gotten painted.

Given our horrible experience with Behr, I will never touch their products again.

Every single experience we have had with Behr products has been terrible!!

The worst was that the primer we used on our new drywall failed. We went to HomeDepot, who sent the samples to Behr (we had our own analysis done confirming it was the primer which was defective, and not the drywall compound), who did nothing to help us, and attempted to deny their product was responsible. Literally thousands of dollars down the drain!! What are you supposed to do when your primer fails?!

And next, the Behr product we put on our decking started failing -- after meticulous preparation, and after only 1 winter. We had to sand it down to remove all traces of the Behr product, and then restart from scratch.

No cute little interactive tool will ever entice me to buy cheap paint or stain again -- it is too costly a product.

If you buy a premium product like Fine Paints of Europe (which we do now), you have the skills and services of a professional colorist. Otherwise, other paint companies such as Benjamin Moore provide great colour palettes.

I've been playing with this tool a lot lately. I've used Behr paint before and never had a problem. The tool at the Home Depots always seem to fail me, I have found that the website is a lot more reliable and there are more color choices than the color swatches in-store.

how true-to-life are online swatches for paint colors? It seems chancy... anyone tried it?

This online paint swatches thing can only work if your computermonitor is properly callibrated.

In theory.........this is a fabulous idea. I've used this technology before and was not satisfied. I chose a color according to how wonderful it looked on the virtual wall. It did not look so accurately wonderful on MY wall.

I like the good old fashioned "bring-a-paint-sample-home" trick........works every time.

I wish they would show what these colors wold look like as a lime wash or stucco.