License and Use

ChromaSpot is meant to be industrial infrastructure, and infrastructure that charges for itself is not infrastructure. The colours, their spectra, the exports and everything on these pages are free to use.

Who publishes it

The measurement side of the project — the instruments, the software that drives them, the printing work behind the samples — is ChromaChecker. ChromaSpot is published by ChromaSync; the two are separate companies working on the same problem.

What you may do

What we ask in return

Not conditions so much as the terms on which this stays worth doing.

Do not charge an end user for access to the colours. If you build an application on ChromaSpot, the basic function — finding a colour, reading its definition, exporting it — should be free to whoever uses your software. Charge for the clever parts you built; do not charge for ours.

Always carry the code with the name. Never emit a name without its code in front of it: 2R3.68 Brick, not Brick. That single convention is what lets a colour survive a name being changed or withdrawn — a client can parse the code out and resolve the colour even if the word is gone. It is a design requirement, not a style preference.

Do not present a modified library as ChromaSpot. Adding your own colours to a copy is fine and useful; calling the result ChromaSpot is not, because the whole value of the codes is that everyone means the same thing by them.

Tell us when something is wrong. Corrections are published with their date and reason — see Versions and Changes.

What we do not collect

This site has no accounts, no login and no analytics. The library is fetched as static files and every export is assembled in your own browser — when you press Download, nothing is uploaded and no record is made of what you chose. Your scratchpad is stored by your browser, on your machine, and is never sent anywhere.

Trademarks and other people’s colours

Colour names in this library are chosen from common vocabulary and checked against the existing set. They are not intended to reference anyone’s mark, and where a conflict is raised the name is withdrawn rather than defended — the colour keeps its code and gets a new name, and the withdrawn name is never issued to another colour.

ChromaSpot does not reproduce, convert or claim compatibility with any other manufacturer’s colour system. Where a colour here happens to sit close to one in another system, that is arithmetic, not a relationship.

The formal terms

Until it is published, the paragraphs above are what the project undertakes and what it asks. They are written to be honest rather than to be enforceable, and nothing in the formal text will contradict them.