As part of my campaign to become interconnected in the whole Web 2.0 world, I actually got a Twitter account.

I said I never would, just because Twitter is such a stupid name and Tweeting is such a silly-sounding thing to do, and also because I refuse to use letters or numbers for perfectly good words.

But all that aside, I did. And so I’ve taken every so often on Twitter to word-searching some terms like “ICC profiles” and “printer profiles”, and of course, “color management.”

So I was word-searching this morning and when I tried “color management” one tweeter had tweeted this:

“I wonder if the engineers who designed color management intended to make it so confusing and frustrating.”

Well, gee…

Know what?

I remember when American Airlines moved to Fort Worth from New York. They went through a process to pick a new ad agency, and part of the winning agency’s presentation was to take a photograph of the meeting room where the principles were assembled to pitch and catch; then at the end of the presentation some two hours later, they handed each of the people present from American a printed image of that same photograph.

And they won the account based in large part of that amazing feat. And that amazing feat made the freakin’ front page of the business section of the Dallas Morning News.

The machine that made this amazing feat possible was the first computer color scanner I ever saw. It lived in a clean room, had its own cooling system, cost half-a-million dollars, and I remember standing with a couple clients damn near slack-jawed the first time we got a demo and saw a background sky changed from one color to another on a screen.

And I don’t know how many hours I spent back in the day at the end of a printing press with clients trying to get color just exactly so.

Now any monkey can get a colorful result. The tools are cheap and any idiot can plug them all together and make them work well enough to get a surprisingly passable result.

But color is still science and it’s still art. Anyone can turn color into numbers, but it gets damn dicey keeping control of the numbers from the starting line to the finish line if you want them to turn out looking professional as opposed to passable.

Fact is that there’s a lot to it, and there’s a lot to learn to make it right. It isn’t that anyone “designed it that way.” It’s just the way it is.