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See The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

The shift is now in the monetisation stage. Everyone was excited when aniline dye was invented (see Synthetic dye.) They were expensive and rare. More dyes followed and now you can choose from the whole Pantone pallet.

Do we really need rooms in 100,000 colors?

Do we really need iPhone 12? Samsung 15?

Be patient, another shift is coming

Ineffective against against the mind control matrix the lizard people are projecting from the hollow core of the moon. I recommend two or three coats of a turquoise paint such as Pantone 13-4720 TPG to cover both cases.

Gee! You seems one of these that never need to print a Pantone or photo. GIMP cannot handle colors for the design industry, several graphic designers would be happy for use Linux. But when they see that GIMP prints an Aquamarine as Safe Web Blue, they come back to Mac or Windows. When GIMP comes out of the comfort zone of "Web only. We never print a paper" maybe you may have more users around.

You do know the reason GIMP cannot use Pantone isn't a technical one, right?

see here

The relevant part

..Without derogating from the generality of the foregoing, published materials of Pantone, are protected by copyright laws and include, for example, graphic presentations, color references, PANTONE Colors, PANTONE Names, numbers, formulas and software. An unauthorized claim by third parties either as principals or agents, inferring that any referenced color or color system is the same as, or equivalent to, a color standard or color system of Pantone, may be a violation of Pantone’s proprietary rights and is strictly prohibited. Similarly, any cross-referencing, in whole or in part, to any PANTONE Color System including, but not limited to, the PANTONE Numbers and PANTONE Colors, by third parties, may be a violation of Pantone’s proprietary rights and is strictly prohibited.

I suspect that the good folks at Pantone would be happy to collaborate with you on a line of co-branded and heavily licensed colors...

Just kick out the offerings here in filament rather than chip shape, add 75% for the service, and you are on your way.

The "Yellow Stars"? The "Spinning Wheel"? The "Rising Sun"? Maybe NASA would consider changing "NASA White" to Pantone #14-0848, "The color yellow exemplifies the warmth and nurturing quality of the sun, properties we as humans are naturally drawn to for reassurance".

This is great information and makes perfect sense. I have been more than impressed with my use of the Pantone huey PRO that has an ambient light sensor, sits near you monitor, and adjusts your display brightness based on the lighting around you. For my eyes, it was well worth the cost.

http://www.pantone.com/pages/products/product.aspx?pid=562&ca=2

plugs into usb, color corrects your monitor, and bonus- if you leave it plugged in and pointing out, as the room gets lighter/darker it adjusts the screen acording to room lighting conditions....

http://www.pantone.com/products/products.asp?idSub Area=0&idArea=2&idProduct=103&idArticleType_Produc ts=0

Hexachrome is patented
http://www.pantone.com/aboutus/aboutus.asp?idArtic le=64&idPressRelease=38

And there was a lot of talking about that on Inkscape mailing list

First and foremost, that website seems to be a step below something like Redbook Magazine.

Moving on, where did you get that this Red/Blue color thing is proven by science? From the link:

What color can you wear to compel the opposite sex to
approach you?

According to Color Consultant Leatrice Eiseman, Director of the
Pantone Color Institute and author of Colors For Your Every Mood,
women are attracted to men wearing the color blue. And why
wouldn't we be? According to Eiseman, guys who frequently
wear blue are "stable, faithful, constant and always there." The
blue guy is a fantastic candidate for a long-term relationship --
someone who's dependable, momogomous and can match his
own clothes.

And what about the ladies? Eiseman says women should wear
a pink- peach to make themselves most approachable. The
color is "very flattering to most skin tones, it gives you healthy
glow," and according to Eiseman, projects "a little vulnerability
which brings out something protective in men."

Want to wear a color that weeds out guys who can't handle
strong women? Try a deep red, burgundy or plum. Men who
aren't attracted to strong women will steer clear.

Of all the colors, red is the most sensual. But, wear red with
caution. "Red is the color of sex and power," says Eiseman.
Red adds an element of excitement and attracts two types of
men - men interested in sex, and men attracted to powerful
women. Sure, you'll probably have to fend off a lot of freaks,
but you could also end up attracting a guy that isn't threatened
by the fact that you make a bigger salary.

Concerned your wardrobe is driving people away? Stay away
from what Eiseman calls "squished caterpillar yellow-green"
which is said to repel both sexes equally.

So, according to a "Color Consultant" (how can I get THAT job?) who is the director for the Pantone Color Institute, women are attracted to blue. Why? Because, according to this "expert", men in blue are "stable, faithful, constant, and always there." They are also dependable, monogomous, and can match their own clothes. This is NOT science. This isn't even pseudo-science. This is personal opinion. This is akin to tabloid horroscopes. The guy offers NOTHING to back up his claims other than some nice words that people might like to hear.

I can only hope that you were being sarcastic in describing this as "proven by science". Or perhaps you are a member of the Zonk Science Club.

In my capacity as a web developer, here are the software packages that I feel you should have a firm understanding of:

1. XHTML - not just 'HTML', XHTML has a few changes that you should get used to (such as closing all tags, even <img src="..."/> and <br/> tags, and all tags being lowercase). For the upcoming specifications, such as XHTML 2.0, which will be very different (you can apply an href="..." property to ANY object, instead of having to wrap it in an <a href=..."> tag), it never hurts to be prepared.
2. CSS3 - May as well read up now, it's going to be relevant in not too long.
3. Photoshop - Use The GIMP if you must, but I find Photoshop generally does what I need it to with less hassle.
4. PHP, ASP, Coldfusion, and J2EE - You don't have to learn how to program in each one, but learn about these solutions, if for no other reason than to make compelling arguments against them if the bosses ever ask you about them (or worse, fail to ask you about them)
5. Apache and IIS - for the same reasons as listed above; also, a lot of things in Apache (mod_rewrite, for example) can help you solve problems down the road. Good things to know.
6. A good editor. I use ViM myself, but what you use is up to you. What you'll want is syntax highlighting, auto-indenting, and a powerful (preferably regex) search/replace. Learn to use your editor and you will save hours of work with seconds of typing.

And now for some soft skills. First, you'll need to learn to give effective presentations. You could use Powerpoint for this, or Keynote or Impress or just print them on transparencies and put them on an overhead projector. How you do it is up to you. Will you ever need to give presentations? Not really, but effective presentations require a lot of soft skills - eye contact, graphic design, pacing, speech tones, body language - that to be skilled in presentations in general means to be skilled in a lot of other areas.

You should also familiarize yourself with colour. Learn about Pantone, just so that you know about it. Learn how colours play off each other, which colors look good on which backgrounds. Learn about bordering, whitespace, balance, and form. Consider the Pantone Guide to Communicating with Color - out of 61 reader reviews, it got 4.5/5 stars, and is a good place to start.

Learn about logos. How companies make logos, and why. What goes into making a logo, subconscious suggestions from logos (there's a reason Playboy picked a bunny for their logo, and it's not obvious). This will help in your graphic design and page layout.

Learn about accessibility and colour-blindness.

I'm probably missing a ton of important stuff, but if you do it right and are willing to learn (and posting on slashdot seems to imply that), you'll probably learn what you need to know as you go. If not, just come back and post another Ask Slashdot.

Adobe has licensed Pantone color matching. If you don't have Pantone, you won't get anywhere, in the design world. Basically, using Pantone guarantees that the color you see on your mock-up is the exact color the press will produce on the final product. Not "close enough," not almost, but exactly. From posters to wallpaper to clothing to linoleum, pretty much. If your designer shows you a sample, you can pretty much rest easy that it will be that color.

One of the key features of Photoshop is its integrated color calibration tools. Getting your monitor to display the colors that you will see in your final product is a critical issue in both the printing and video production environments. The fact that you can separate CYMK is good if you want your output directed towards a professional printing solution, but it's not enough.

There are solutions for Windows and Mac but not for Linux/BSD. Maybe someone could start an open color matching standard at some point. In any case, this issue is IMO what will hold GIMP back from professional use.

here in the US, orange is trademarked by fedex. actually it's what they call a proprietary custom pantone, and supposedly only fedex and pantone know what the mix is. same goes for almost any major corporate color, and is usually described in the standards manual.

Try flipping through the bluish-green section of a Pantone swatch book and attempt to scan or photograph some of the pages. Then try and get the colors on the screen to get exactly right. Many colors cannot be represented accurately on a RGB monitor, though the wavelengths of those colors CAN be represented using combinations of LEDs emitting different wavelengths than the phosphors or LCD pigments used on today's monitors.

So much like Pantone introduced their Hexachrome six-color printing system to get more accurate color printing on paper, I should like to see an image processing system with 4 or more wavelengths.

At the very least we should get rid of sRGB (which sucks) and switch to something with a nicer gamut like Adobe RGB.

Oh, sh!t, better tell these guys to quit the business, their company does not exist, hell, these guys are toast as well.
As an ex-commercial photog working exclusively in digital, I can tell you not only is it possible, it's quite easy and inexpensive to have your monitor, *inkjet printer* (that's right, you heard me), and output (be it CMYK offset, WEB or photoprint) match each other.

They haven't patented color. They've patented a very specific system of color definitions. You can use any color in the world you'd like without their permission or okay. But if you go to your local printer and leaf through their color swatch book and say "i'd like this plate to be this exact color", then you're generally using Pantone colors.

You generally only ever see pantone colors on print jobs of 1, 2 or 3 colors, because most of the specturm of colors can be recreated using 4 colors.

They fill a niche. I hope i explained it adequately... Maybe their website will offer a clearer explanation for you... :-)

I remember when I was in the clothing industry there was a standard Pantone that was used for colors. That way a green xxxx.x was allways a green on pring, fabric, screen etc.

There are basically two types of color matching that are relevant. The first is Pantone spot colors, and the second is ICC. The latter is generally what you'd use when preparing photos and related images for CMYK offset printing. ICC is gaining ground, and is used as the color matching standard in such emerging technologies as SVG.

Pantone is basically a named collection of colors. The cool thing about Pantone is that you can communicate Pantone colors to professional printers, and they know how to match it. Let's say for example that you're doing a business card, and you want your logo to be in black and a nice deep blue. By specifying Pantone 280, you can be assured that the printers will produce the same nice deep blue that you intended. Incidentally, it's not hard to find a Pantone palette for Gimp if you're skilled at Web searching.

Pantone colors are far less useful when dealing with natural images. The Pantone palette is only a few thousand colors, while the standard for scanned images is sixteen million. These are all the colors between "nice deep blue" and "slightly deeper blue than that". That's where ICC comes in.

ICC basically specifies a transformation from a source color space (say, a calibrated RGB such as sRGB) to a destination color space (say, CMYK values for your particular printing press). In theory, this allows exact color matches between scanned, displayed, and printed images, but in practice things are a lot more complicated because (a) people don't perceive color the same way from an emissive display such as a CRT and reflected color from paper, and (b) not all devices can reproduce the same range of colors. Category (b) is especially tricky because the only way to ensure an exact color match is to use a lowest-common-denominator set of colors. As you can imagine, that's not a good idea. It doesn't look very good. In any case, ICC goes at least partway to solving these things.

Now we get to the patent problem. It appears that Electronics for Imaging has some patents that cover the generic idea of colorimetric matching between scan, display, and print. These patents have recently been upheld in court, so they'd appear to be pretty strong. I don't see a way around them.

As far as I know, these patents only apply in the United States. There is some very interesting development of color management code going on outside the US. Perhaps in 2003, when the most important of the EFI patents expires, this means that color management will be free for all to use.

Hope this clears things up.

You might want to start here :-)

Anyway, while it should be possible to come up with a new, unpatented color-matching system, I'd imagine there would be two problems:

- It would be very VERY costly to develop (esp. if it's to be on par with Pantone), and
- Then you have to convince almost every graphic designer in the world to switch. (Compatibility is good, but 100% is unlikely, methinks)

The solution I've heard mentioned is for someone to produce a non-free [binary?] Gimp plug-in. I think this will happen someday, once the app has matured enough to raise eyebrows among professional artists. (Still need CYMK support!)