🌸 Inspiration
We make coloring books, not apps. Or at least, we used to. We are a coloring book brand with cute, hand-drawn pages and characters, made for adults and teens. People love coloring them for fun and relaxation. At one point, the idea came to expand our product with a mobile coloring app, so our fans can color our books everywhere. The phone is always with us, but you can't always bring your books and markers. We wanted the app to feel like an extension of the books people already love, not a replacement. A little cozy break in your pocket, for the train, waiting in line, or five quiet minutes on the couch.
🎨 What it does
Colored Caramel brings our coloring books to iPhone, iPad and Android phones and tablets. Right now there are 22 books and more than 900 pages inside, and new books and pages are added every month, at no extra cost for users.
Pick a book or a simple page Choose one of our hand-drawn coloring books, or a quick and simple illustration when you only have a few minutes.
Tap or color by hand Fill a shape with just one tap, or color by hand with your finger, or a pen on a tablet.
Colors your way Pick any color from the spectrum or the color grid. You can save your favorite colors as palettes, so you can always reuse them.
Markers that feel real Our markers have softness, so you can blend and make gradients, just like our customers do in their real books. You can add glitter and textures for a special effect.
Made for small details Zoom in and turn the page for easier coloring, so even the tiniest details are easy to reach.
Continue coloring and your gallery Your work-in-progress pages save automatically in the continue coloring section. And once you're done and happy, you can save your page in your little gallery, share it or save it to your photos.
🧁 How we built it
The app was built in-house. A member of our team designed it, and our developer built the app using Flutter, Dart, Directus and RevenueCat.
RevenueCat handles all our subscriptions and access on both stores. It runs our monthly and yearly plans, the 7-day free trial, and who gets access to the books. We set prices in three levels by country, so the app is fair for people everywhere.
🌧️ Challenges we ran into
The idea was great, but we came into this world with zero experience and a low budget, so we ran into all kinds of challenges. It meant learning everything from scratch, designing the app ourselves, and changing developers a few times until we found the one who fit our team and helped us bring the idea to life.
The tools One of our biggest challenges was deciding which tools our users would actually need to color. We wanted the app to stay simple, without too many complicated tools, but still let people color beautifully, add gradients and blend, like our customers do in the real books. In the end, we kept it to a few tools that do a lot: tap to fill, soft markers for blending, glitter and textures, and saved palettes.
UX, UI and copywriting Our books have a cute, cozy voice, and we wanted the app to have it too. The hard part was translating that voice into the app while keeping every button and message clear and short.
Finding our audience We wanted to create an app that feels like an extension of the coloring books people already love. But we also wanted to welcome people who have never colored a single page in their life. Making the app feel familiar to our fans and easy for complete beginners was a balance we keep coming back to.
Turning our drawings into a coloring canvas Our pages are hand-drawn, and turning each drawing into a canvas you can color was much harder than we expected. Reading the drawing files (SVGs) and turning them into colorable shapes caused a lot of performance issues. Our developer tried many different algorithms until it was fast enough to feel smooth on a phone.
There's still a moment while a page gets ready, so we turned it into something nice: when you open a page, an animation draws the outlines for you. It hides the loading time, and it feels like watching the page being drawn just before you start coloring.
Getting through App Store review Our first App Store review didn't go smoothly. We were rejected three or four times before the app was approved, and each time we learned something new about Apple's rules. There were obstacles at every step, from the design and the user experience to getting every feature to work smoothly.
💖 Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud to bring this app to life and to keep it in the same vibe as our coloring books. We kept the cuteness, softness and coziness by using the hand-drawn characters from our books, and we created custom emojis and icons for the app too. Every page, icon and emoji in the app is hand-drawn.
When you open a page, the outlines draw themselves before you start coloring. It began as a fix for loading time, and became one of our favorite little details.
We believe we moved our coloring books to the phone and still kept the essence of relaxation and "offline" creativity that coloring brings.
Our printed books have 4.96 out of 5 from 961 reviews, and we wanted the app to live up to that.
🌱 What we learned
We learned how to build an app from scratch: from the design and the user experience to working with developers and making every detail feel like our books. We also learned that simple is the hardest thing to design.
🌈 What's next for Colored Caramel coloring app
Our app is launching today, and we're presenting it to our audience. New books and pages are coming every month, along with new features that will make coloring even smoother and more fun. We might also add a pinch of gamification. Most of all, we'll keep listening to our audience and what they would like to see.
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