Painting By Numbers—Visual Imagination Creates A Digital Color Guide
Off for the summer, middle-school teacher Amanda Morris was looking for a summer job while she decompressed and prepared for the fall term at a new school. The 28-year-old knew she had a sure thing at the famed Visual Imagination powerboat graphic-design and paint shop in Peculiar, Mo. , but there was one catch.
She’d be working for Mark Morris, her father, who founded the business in 1998. She and her twin sister, Abby, had worked for their dad many years before. They didn’t last long.
“The girls said he was too mean,” explained Laura Morris, with a giggle, during dinner this week in their beautiful home.
The father-daughter Morris collaboration has produced an incredible database results.
Amanda Morris soft of objected.
“It wasn’t that he was ‘mean,’” she said, then laughed. “He was so busy he just didn’t necessarily have time to explain things to us.”
A man of few words, Morris shrugged, smiled and said, “I guess.”
To spend time with Morris family, as I did (minus Abby) for three days this week, is to fall in love with them. The clan, which currently includes four shelties, two rescued kittens and an undetermined number of cats, is close in a way that blends merciless teasing with laughter—lots and lots of laughter—and ferocious devotion to one another.
This time around, the family patriarch had the perfect project in mind and his school-teacher daughter. Her mission was clear: Bring dad into the digital age.
And Morris was ready. Here’s why:
By even the most conservative estimate, the man has painted 500 to 600 boats in the past 26 years. And he’s been diligent about writing down paint numbers, blend ratios and more for every job and storing that information in an overstuffed file folder.
Rudimentary information storage system it is. Efficient digital information retrieval system it is not. And Morris finds himself digging for such information several times a week.
A sample digital paint-color document from Visual Imagination.
“Painters and customers call for it, usually when they have a repair to do,” he explained. “It happens all the time.
“I’m always happy to supply paint numbers and stuff,” he continued, then chuckled. “A lot of painters don’t want to do that because they see it as ‘secret.’ I can figure out any color, but I don’t want to make things hard on other people so I always give out that stuff.”
Digging out those project specifics was a time-suck Morris didn’t need, so he came up with a plan: Get all the paint information for every boat Visual Imagination has ever painted into a database and create PDFs with all that information for each project. Then create a portal for easy access to the database so Morris can immediately respond to requests and deliver the information in a clean, professional format.
And Amanda Morris, was the perfect woman for the job. She started, of course, by creating the Visual Imagination paint-color database.
Using the Shortcut feature on her iPhone, Amanda Morris created a “widget,” much like an app, for accessing the paint-color database. “I’d use it for organizing things when I taught,” she explained. “It can be a little confusing at first, but once you understand how it works it’s not that hard.”
The Morris clan is beautifully close-knit.
Her father laughed. “I think the hardest part for Amanda was figuring out my ‘notes’ in some places,” he said. “But she’s a really quick study and she figured out most of what my abbreviations meant right away.”
With that project behind her—she finished this week—Amanda Morris isn’t sure what she’ll be doing for her dad next week. She has no boat-painting skills, so there’s a good chance it will be something organizational that brings her artist-father into the 21st Century. Visual Imagination’s social media portals need updating, to put it kindly, so she may start there.
But what she does know is that come noon each day she and her pop will head to the Morris family home, which is just a few hundred yards from the paint shop, for lunch, just as they’ve done every day she since started working for him.
“Where else can you get a job with a free lunch?” she said, then laughed again.
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