Foundry stops development of Colorway

A recording of a livestream on Modo Geeks TV with Foundry product manager Greg Brown earlier this month. The announcement that the firm is no longer developing Colorway starts around 00:03:20.

Foundry has stopped development of Colorway, its software for generating and visualising variants of product designs, as part of a wider move away from design-specific tools.

At the time of writing, Colorway is still listed on Foundry’s website, but the firm has confirmed that its old development team is now working on Modo, Foundry’s 3D modelling and rendering software.

Part of a wider restructuring of Foundry’s former Enterprise Design group
Launched in 2014 and released commercially the following year, Colorway was a “digital design assistant” for generating and communicating variations of product designs for marketing and internal communications.

The software was particularly used in shoe design – both Nike and New Balance adopted it in their pipelines – with many firms using it alongside Modo.

Along with a third upcoming application, the tools formed Foundry’s Enterprise Design group of products.

That group has now been restructured, with work on Colorway and the unreleased third product stopped, and the entire developer team – which had been working across all three apps – assigned to Modo.

“Colorway is no longer continuing forward at Foundry,” commented Modo product manager Greg Brown in a livestream earlier this month. “Our entire team is now enirely focused on Modo and Modo only.”

Modo itself is being targeted less at individual market sectors, a strategy that Brown describes as ‘Modo for everyone’, commenting that “focusing on a specific industry isn’t the direction that 3D is going”.

Visit the old Colorway product website
(Still available at the time of writing)