In doing some work for the ACLU of Arkansas, I needed to convert some colors, and was flummoxed when I couldn’t find a good converter that would to Pantone to RGB and HEX values. Wolfram Alpha, being a computation engine, should find this right up its alley. It’s the first feature request I’ve submitted to the site, and they promise “[...] to respond to as many suggestions and comments as possible,
and to implement good suggestions we are given.”

I think it’s a good suggestion; what do you think? Here’s what I sent:

The ability to convert and recognize colors, such as:

Dark Blue == PMS 647 == #26547C == rgb(38,84,124)
Light Blue == PMS 279 == #6689CC == rgb(102,137,204)

Beige == PMS 4545 == #E5DBBA == rgb(229,219,186)
Dark Grey == PMS 403 == #998C7C == rgb(153,140,124)
Light Grey == PMS 5455 == #D6D8D3 == rgb(214,216,211)
Burnt Orange == PMS 145 == #C67F07 == rgb(198,127,7)
Burgundy == PMG 1815 == #990000 == cmyk(0,90,100,51)

These colors come from the ACLU Identity Guidelines and list the primary and secondary colors to be used in conjunction with the ACLU brand. I converted the Pantone (PMS) numbers by looking up “convert pms color to web” on Google and clicking the first result which provided a nice lookup table. Unfortunately, this table did not have one result I needed (“PMS 1815″), so I Googled that term. This brought up the official color palette for the University of Utah, provided by that school’s Marketing department. Note that they do not provide an rgb() value, denoted with some improvised syntax.

So, first feature request is for recognition of color values, and proffered conversion of alternate formats, as represented herein.

Secondly, it becomes obvious from the examples that many organizations (non-profits, businesses, and universities) take branding seriously, so I believe that “official colors” should be a part of an entity in Wolfram Alpha (i.e., “Stanford” being a university, “Google” being a financial entity, etc).

Possible calculations would be seeing companies with similar color profiles (then sort based on continent, say, to see the gestalt of corporate colors per country, compare based on industry, etc).

Thanks for your consideration!