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Pantone Launches AI Tool for Generating Color Palettes
In a move that feels both inevitable and genuinely inspired, Pantone—the longtime arbiter of global color language—has thrown its hat into the generative AI ring with a new tool that feels less like a gimmick and more like a natural extension of its six-decade legacy. The Pantone Palette Generator, now available within the Pantone Connect extension for Adobe apps, isn't just another chatbot; it’s a digital muse trained exclusively on the company's vast, proprietary archive of color research, trend forecasting, and articles from its Color Institute.This isn't a model scraping the chaotic internet for inspiration; it’s a curated, almost scholarly approach to AI, offering what Pantone's VP of Product and Engineering, Ora Solomon, describes as a solution to a fundamental designer pain point: the time-consuming hunt for the perfect palette. The tool operates with the familiar cadence of a chat-based assistant—you provide a prompt, and it returns a cohesive color scheme complete with a rationale and supporting links, presented in a clean, executive-summary format that you can then refine through further conversation.The genesis of this project was a pragmatic alignment of corporate strategy and user need, facilitated by Pantone's parent company, Veralto, and its technology partnership with Microsoft, though Solomon is quick to emphasize that the AI's intelligence is purely homegrown, a distillation of Pantone's own color philosophy. What resonates most profoundly here isn't the interface, which is standard for an LLM, but the foundational data—a closed, ethically sourced library of color knowledge that one early user at Adobe MAX aptly dubbed 'ethical AI.' This distinction is crucial in an era of rampant, often uncredited, data scraping. For creatives, this tool is less about automation replacing intuition and more about accelerating the initial, often daunting, phase of exploration, providing a trusted starting point rooted in authoritative color theory.Solomon confirms the model is a living entity, with its first major update slated for the imminent reveal of the Pantone Color of the Year, ensuring its suggestions remain on the bleeding edge of global color trends. As a beta release, this is merely the first brushstroke on a much larger canvas, with Pantone committed to iterating based on real-world usage. For designers, the Pantone Palette Generator is now accessible, a new tube of digital paint on their palette, promising to blend the timeless authority of Pantone with the dynamic potential of artificial intelligence.
#Pantone
#AI tool
#color palette
#generative AI
#Adobe Connect
#design software
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