Colors and the Color Library

Color in GarmentFlow lives on the Variant doctype. A Variant is a specific colorway, wash, or design — for example a solid like Pantone® 19-1664 TPX, a wash like "Indigo Stone Wash," or a design like "SS26 Tropical Floral." Every Tech Pack lists the Variants it's available in, and every finished garment carries its Variant as part of its identity.

Getting color right matters. The wrong shade in production is one of the most expensive mistakes a factory makes; the wrong color name in GarmentFlow is one of the most common ones.

Variant

A Variant has a handful of fields that matter:

Type — Solid, Wash, or Design. Drives which other fields are shown.
Color — a color picker that stores the color as a computer color code (a "hex" value, e.g. #1B2A4E). You don't need to know the code; just pick the color visually.
Color code — the standard color reference (such as a Pantone® code), when applicable.
Image — an attached swatch, color card, or artwork.

Solid colors carry a color value and (usually) a standard color code. Washes link to a Denim Shade. Designs carry a name and an artwork image. The next three sections cover each path.

Swatch Library

You don't have to type variants into the table by hand. On the Tech Pack's Logistics tab, under the Variants table, is a single button — Swatch Library — and behind it sit the three pickers, one per variant type:

Menu entry	Opens	Use it for
Color	Color Picker	Solid colors, searched by code or matched visually against 2,310+ library swatches.
Wash	Denim Shades	Indigo, aged indigo and black denim washes.
Print	Design Picker	Artwork — placement prints, all-over prints, embroidery layouts.

One button rather than three keeps the choice in front of you: what kind of variant is this? A wash is not a solid, and specifying it as one loses the wash detail the laundry needs.

Choosing a swatch

Whichever picker you open, choosing works the same way. Browse or search the gallery, then click the swatch you want.

The gallery dims to near-black — a darkroom — and the swatch you clicked grows to fill the left side of the window at full height, uncropped. This is deliberate. A 140-pixel thumbnail in a grid of two hundred others is not enough to judge a shade against a physical sample or a brand's artwork; the enlarged card is.

On the right, three things:

Variant Name — pre-filled with the swatch's library name and selected, so you can just start typing. Replace it with whatever production and the customer will recognise: Navy Blue, Vintage Indigo, Tropical Floral.
The color code underneath the eyebrow, so you can confirm you're on the right swatch before committing.
Three buttons:

Button	What it does
Insert Variant	Adds the row and shrinks back to the gallery, ready for the next one. Use this when you're adding a colorway range.
Insert and Close	Adds the row and closes the picker. Use this for the last one.
Back to Swatches	Returns without adding anything.

Enter inserts, Esc goes back, and clicking the dimmed area behind the swatch also goes back.

What lands on the Tech Pack

Inserting adds one row to the Variants table, already carrying:

Variant — the link to the shared library record.
Variant Name — the name you typed.
Color and Image — fetched from the library record, so the swatch shows in the table.
Quantity — set to 1.

You finish the row yourself: the planned Quantity for this colorway, and the Thread details (color, weight, textured) if the style needs them. See Setup on the Logistics tab for what those drive downstream.

Tip

Add every colorway in one visit. Insert Variant deliberately keeps you in the gallery so a six-color range is six clicks and six names, not six round trips through the menu.

Image: The Color Picker with a swatch selected — the gallery dimmed behind, the color card enlarged on the left, and the Variant Name field and buttons on the right.

Solid colors and the color library

GarmentFlow comes preloaded with 2,310+ industry-standard colors for you to pick from — each one a Variant record with its code, color value, and color card image already filled in. No setup beyond the one-time load.

The preloaded set is drawn from a public, open color dataset: github.com/margaret2/pantone-colors.

Color Picker (Swatch Library → Color) is how you find the right color when you don't already know the code. Two ways in, side by side at the top:

Search. Type a color number (e.g. 19-4010) to jump straight to it. Results are ordered by code, 60 at a time, with Load More at the bottom.
Color Match. Pick a color visually and the gallery is replaced by the 20 closest matches, ranked by similarity. Use this when the brand has given you a shade rather than a code — a physical swatch, a photo, a hex value from a design file.

Clear the Color Match field to go back to browsing the full library.

Tip

When matching color on a screen, turn off Night Shift / Night Light (the warm orange tint some operating systems apply in the evening). The shift can throw your color judgement off enough to pick the wrong shade — unless you already know the exact code you want.

Color ↔ code auto-sync. Once you've picked or entered something, the rest fills in:

Sync from color. Pick a color visually → the picker finds the closest match and fills in the code and name.
Sync from code. Enter a code like 19-1664 TPX → the picker fills in the color value and the color card image.
Select from existing. Search the library by code or name and pick — everything pre-fills.

Note: the color picker on the Variant form itself just stores a color; only the library's Color Picker performs the closest-match lookup.

Denim Shades

Alongside the color library, GarmentFlow ships a Denim Shade library for denim work (Swatch Library → Wash), organized by family:

Blue — from dark raw indigo through to super-light wash.
Blue Aged — vintage and worn tones.
Black — raw black through to washed and faded black.

Each family has a checkbox at the top of the picker, all three ticked by default. Untick the ones you're not working in and those sections disappear, which makes a long scroll through blue washes a lot shorter when you're specifying a black jean.

When specifying a denim wash, pick the shade that best matches the desired finish from this library rather than approximating with a solid color code. The shade carries denim-specific wash notes that a color code doesn't.

Designs and Prints

For artwork-based variants — placement prints, all-over prints, embroidery layouts, sublimation graphics — use the Design variant type. Designs don't carry a color or code; they carry a name and an attached artwork image.

Design Picker (Swatch Library → Print) browses your artwork the way a file explorer would: a grid of prints, each card showing the artwork itself with its name underneath, newest first. Unlike the color and denim libraries — which ship preloaded — this one starts empty and fills up with your own work, season by season.

Search filters by name as you type. Search before anything else; a print you already own is one click, a duplicate is a mess to unpick later.
Load More pages through the rest, 60 at a time.
Clicking a card opens the same confirm step as a color, so you see the artwork large before it lands on the spec — worth doing when two colorways of the same print look alike as thumbnails.

Only active Design variants are listed. A print that's been disabled on its Variant record won't clutter the grid.

Adding a new print. The first tile in the grid is a dashed + New Print card:

Design Name — required, and unique. Be specific: SS26 Tropical Floral, Acme Logo Chest Print. A name like "Print 1" is a name you'll regret in six months.
Artwork — required. Attach the image.
Create Print — the design is created and the grid reloads with it at the front, ready to select.

If the name is already taken GarmentFlow tells you rather than creating a second record under the same name — which is the point: two records for one artwork means two sets of production instructions for the same print.

Note

Creating a print here creates a Variant master, not something local to this Tech Pack. It's immediately available to every other style. That's the intent — a brand logo print, a recurring all-over pattern, or a seasonal artwork is created once and applied wherever it's used.

Selecting an existing design links it. It never copies the artwork, so correcting a print on the Variant record corrects it everywhere it's used.

Humanising the Variant Name

When you pick a color or Denim Shade, the Variant Name box in the confirm step arrives pre-filled with the library's own name for it. You can (and usually should) type over it with something a production operator or customer recognises: Navy Blue, Bottle Green, Vintage Indigo.

That name is yours, per Tech Pack. The same color can be Naranja on one Tech Pack and Orange on another — both still point at the one shared library record, so color reports stay consistent while day-to-day people see a name they understand. Renaming here never renames the library record, and never creates a second one.

This humanised name is what appears on production orders, batches, labels, packing lists, and shipping documents.

When to Create a New Variant

Off-library "Acme Red" variants are allowed and sometimes the right call — but they require discipline. Without it, duplicates pile up ("Acme Red," "Acme Red 2," "Acme Red Final") and erode the consistency that makes color reports useful.

The good news: when you pick from the color library or the Denim Shade library, GarmentFlow matches on the color code itself and reuses the existing Variant record instead of creating a duplicate. Pick the same color twice across two Tech Packs — under two different friendly names, even — and you'll get the same Variant on both, not two copies. The code is what identifies a color, not the label anyone typed on it.

Guidance:

Solid colors — pick from the color library whenever the brand has given you a code. Deduplication is automatic.
Denim washes — pick from the Denim Shade library. Same automatic dedupe.
Off-brand or custom solids — create a new Variant if you genuinely have no standard color reference, but name it clearly and resist creating near-duplicates.
Designs and Prints — search the existing Variants first. If the artwork is already in GarmentFlow from a previous Tech Pack, reuse it; only create a new one if it's genuinely new artwork.

What to do next

Move on to Size charts and points of measurement to set up the size scales your Tech Packs will use.