The International Color Consortium (ICC), which develops mechanisms for clearly defining and uniformly reproducing color, is taking steps to broaden participation in developing color-management strategies and to have the ICC specification recognized as an international standard through the International Organization for Standardization's Technical Committee 130, Graphic Technology. A working-group of ICC members plans to propose and circulate ways to harmonize Version 4.1 of the ICC specification with ISO requirements.

“ICC has tackled one of the most pressing and complex challenges in printing and related industries today and devised a highly effective and actionable specification,” says ICC Chariman Lars Borg of Adobe Systems. “It is highly appropriate that this specification should reach a global constituency through the medium of ISO, because effective standardization is one of the keys to our industry's continued success.”

To broaden the range of input involved in ongoing refinements of the specification, the ICC plans to plans to invite knowledgeable technology users and industry consultants to participate in future meetings.

To promote better understanding of its work, ICC has added a set of frequently asked questions (FAQ) to their website and encourage interested parties to address specific questions to ICC Technical Secretary Tony Johnson via the site's “Ask Tony” section.

Eight industry vendors established the ICC in 1993 in order to create an open, vendor-neutral, cross-platform architecture for color management. ICC's regular membership now includes 67 companies and organizations, plus four honorary members and seven liaison members. NPES, the Association for Suppliers of Printing, Publishing and Converting Technologies, serves as the ICC's administrative secretariat. (International Color Consortium: www.color.org)