For all the advances in design software and technology, gaps in the creative professional’s toolkit remain. In particular, one that has been elusive is high-quality textured swatches that accurately represent paper.

Designers have had to resort to manual hacks to incorporate the properties of the printing material. Premium paper manufacturer Neenah saw a real need for swatches that include their products’ texture to use in digital design software like Adobe Illustrator.

These workarounds, while better than nothing, are imperfect and time-consuming—something Neenah’s Creative Director, Dallas Franklin, understood through first-hand experience while working on in-house projects – and so unsurprisingly, she is enthusiastic about their latest development, Neenah Swatch Pro, which not only displays a material’s color accurately but its texture as well. Plus, it is the first-ever paper extension for Adobe Illustrator.