Pantone and brand palette manager for freelance logo designers

The moment someone realizes they have this problem is the third time in a week they've rebuilt their client's brand palette from scratch in a new Illustrator document — hex codes typed in manually, Pantone swatches hunted through a bloated library, gradient stops re-entered by hand. It's tedious work that happens before the real design work even starts.

The gap persists because Adobe and Affinity both sell to a massive range of users — print shops, UI designers, illustrators, hobbyists — and palette management is peripheral to what they market. There's no business reason for them to build a deep, standalone palette persistence layer when their core product is the drawing canvas. The user who suffers most, the freelance logo designer cycling through dozens of client brand systems, isn't loud enough or concentrated enough to move a product roadmap at a company that size.

What's missing is specific: a way to store named client palettes — including exact Pantone codes, CMYK values, and RGB equivalents side by side — and inject them into any new document without clicking through swatches panels or re-entering values. Right now, finding a Pantone color through the built-in picker requires switching to Photoshop for accuracy, according to multiple complaints. The built-in swatch groups are clunky to create and non-transferable between documents without manual export steps.

This is a business rather than a feature because it solves a problem that recurs on every single project, for every client, forever. A freelancer with 20 active clients has 20 brand systems to track. When they onboard a new client or revisit an old one after six months, they spend 15–30 minutes reconstructing color context that should already be there. Multiply that across a year and it's a meaningful chunk of unbillable time. The need doesn't go away as they get better at design — it gets worse as they get more clients.

What to build

Build a desktop app (Mac and Windows) that stores client brand palettes as named profiles — each with Pantone, CMYK, RGB, and hex values linked per color — and exports them as ready-to-import swatch files for Illustrator (.ase) and Affinity Designer (.afpalette) with one click, so a designer opens a new document and imports a complete client palette in under 10 seconds.

Where to start

Start with Illustrator-only .ase export for designers who work exclusively in Adobe, because that format is better documented and covers the largest base of paying users who already feel this pain acutely.

The hard part

The .ase and .afpalette formats are underdocumented and format support diverges across app versions, so maintaining accurate export fidelity — especially for Pantone Lab values — requires ongoing reverse-engineering work every time the host apps update.

How it makes money

One-time purchase around $49, with a paid upgrade for team sync features (shared client palette libraries across a studio) at $12/month per seat.