Snap a picture of something colorful:

Email it to colors [at] mailchimp.com, and then wait for a reply:

We’ll email you the hex colors, suggested color themes from Kuler and COLOURlovers, and we’ll attach an Adobe color palette file.

If you’re curious, here’s the backstory…

I saw a really cool billboard the other day, and snapped a picture of it on my iPhone:

Is that She Hulk? I dunno.

But I liked the colors, and I wanted to save it for future inspiration. Then I thought, “it’d be cool if I could send this picture to MailChimp, and the monkey could tell me the hex-values for all the colors in the pic.” I mentioned it to Chad, our lead engineer, and he worked with Aarron (UX Lead) and James (Web Designer) to build Pictaculous.

What I love about it most is how we’re using what we learned from this previous experiment with Mechanical Turk, and this experiment with the Automagic Email Designer. I also love the fact that we were showing it to Josh, our video dude, and before we finished our little demo, he said, “Oh yeah and it sends you some kind of Adobe color palette as an attachment?” Chad just looked at him and said, “Good idea. I can do that.” See, I was once a lowly Industrial Design intern at a major appliance company, and one day their “skunkworks” engineers stopped by the design studio and showed us some prototypes. Being an extremely stupid kid who didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut, I spoke out of turn and guessed out loud what that gizmo did. I was totally wrong. Not just wrong, but bass-ackwards. The other designers looked at me like my stupidity was contagious or something, but the engineers just looked at each other, and said, “that’s not a bad idea, let’s go try that!” and literally ran out of the room. I thought to myself, “I need to switch departments.”

They never did like my idea of an always-on, melted Velveeta cheese dispenser for their refrigerators though.

Anyhoooooo…

There are many tools out there that will analyze the colors of an uploaded picture, but the beautiful thing about Pictaculous is you can snap pictures from your mobile device, then get your results within minutes. All while you’re on the go. Think about it. When are you always inspired? When you’re out hiking, shopping, at the bookstore, on vacation, etc.

Finally, it’s slightly buggy. That’s why it’s a Labs experiment. We’re experimenting with technology that we’d never trust inside the MailChimp application (yet), like Flash-based file uploaders and such. So we know there are Linux and IE issues here and there. But for the most part, people have been sending us great feedback.

Try Pictaculous!

MailChimp widget on Nokia

A little while back we launched a Yahoo Mobile Widget for MailChimp. It was a handy little way to access your MailChimp stats while on the go. We really weren’t sure if anyone would use it, but we wanted to tinker with Yahoo’s Blueprint anyway.

A couple days ago we checked up on it, and it looks like we spiked at over 600+ users, then leveled off to a little over 500 users now. What a pleasant surprise!

If you’re a MailChimp customer who’s always on the go, be sure to check out these mobile-related features:

• MailChimp Yahoo Widget
• MailChimp for iPhone
• How MailChimp automagically creates mobile-friendly emails
• Mobile blogging with MailChimp + Squarespace

For example, if your HTML email looks like this:

and one of the subscribers on your list had the “mobile” preference selected when they signed up for your list:

the email they receive would be automatically formatted for their mobile device, like this:

Generally, images are smaller, and content is stacked into a single column.

If you’d like this enabled for your MailChimp campaigns, make sure that your signup forms have this option checked under your list “defaults” setting:

If your signup forms already had this option on, then the feature is retroactively automatic. If you’re using your own code for your signup form (advanced mode) then you’ll need to add a “mobile” option to your code for this to work.

And speaking of mobile email marketing:

• Check how your email campaigns render on some mobile devices with our Inbox Inspector
• MailChimp campaign archives auto-detect mobile browsers
• MailChimp for iPhone
• MailChimp for Android
• MailChimp Yahoo Mobile Widget
• Pre-headers and mobile devices
• Mobile Email Design Tip: The 250px Magic Box

Each and every email campaign sent out with MailChimp is given a permanent, unique address in our Campaign Archive.  This is the location we link to from the campaign header text: Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. (click to view the example shown at left)

In MailChimp v3.4, we’ve added an elegant new feature that will automatically translate your campaigns into a mobile friendly version when viewed in a mobile browser.  It’s automatic and the feature just works! There is no need to change your opt-in form to provide a mobile option under “preferred format” because we’ve built this functionality into the system for you.

At left, you’ll see an email campaign sent from Soup Studios just as it appeared in my iPhone mail.  All I have to do to view the mobile device optimized version is click on the “View it in your browser” link in the email header.  This automatically opens the link in my iPhone’s Safari browser– which MailChimp can detect– and displays a mobile version of the campaign.  Pretty cool stuff, huh? (see screen shot below)

Automatically Optimized for Mobile Devices

One more point worth mentioning is that if you’re on the go and want to view a campaign, you can easily check out the mobile version on your hand-held device.  Unlike when you opt-in to a list and select “mobile device” as your preferred email format, with MailChimp you will still have the original email available for viewing when you get back to your computer.

This works for all mobile devices with a web browser, so it’s not just for iPhone users.  It comes as no surprise that four out of five doctors recommend taking advantage of mobile versions of email campaigns in conjunction with MailChimp for iPhone, Android, or Yahoo Blueprint enabled devices.

You’re welcome.

MailChimp widget on Nokia

We recently launched MailChimp for the iPhone. But for those of you who aren’t iPhone users, you can still use MailChimp on your mobile device, thanks to Yahoo’s Blueprint. The new platform makes it really easy to create a mobile app that works on a wide variety of phones. Really cool stuff.

To give it a try, go to beta.m.yahoo.com and then look for the little widget icon:

This will take you to Yahoo’s widget gallery. You can search for “mailchimp” and then download the app. Then just login to your MailChimp account.

Here’s what the app will look like:

Click on a campaign to see its stats

Your campaign's stats

MailChimp Campaign Stats on iPhone

The guys in the MailChimp Lab have just launched a mini-MailChimp for the iPhone.

MailChimp customers: just go to MailChimp.com on your iPhone and sign in (or go straight to admin.mailchimp.com), then we’ll redirect you to the iPhone version.

It’s not a fully functional MailChimp account where you can create a full blown HTML Email campaign. Think of it as “MailChimp Lite.” It’s a way for you to log in to your account, quickly check the stats (Mmmmm, pie charts) for your recent campaigns, read your “Chimp Chatter” to find out what’s going on with your email marketing, and it’s a handy way to subscribe people you meet (such as at trade shows and events) to your email lists.

When you’re logged in, you’ll see this:

Home page when you log in to MailChimp for iPhone

1. Click on “dashboard” to go to your Chimp Chatter. MailChimp will give you a bird’s eye view of everything that’s going on with your email marketing.
2. Click on “reports” for a list of recent campaigns. Then, click a campaign to see its stats.
3. Click on “subscribe” to see all your managed MailChimp lists. Then, pick a list, and you can add a subscriber to the list.

Check your recent campaign stats