Pantone

How it began

In the 1950s every ink maker had its own colour cards, and a colour chosen from one could not be matched reliably by another printer. Lawrence Herbert, who worked at a small New Jersey printing firm called Pantone and later bought it, reduced the stock of inks to a small set of base colours and published a fan-shaped guide of numbered swatches, each with its mixing formula. Printers and designers bought the same guide, so they were looking at the same reference. The system spread from the United States across the world.

Spot colours

A Pantone colour is normally printed as a spot colour: one premixed ink laid down solid, instead of being built from dots of cyan, magenta, yellow and black. That gives a cleaner, more consistent result and can reach oranges, greens and metallics that four-colour printing cannot. The letter after the number shows the paper: C for coated, U for uncoated. The same ink looks different on each. Pantone runs a separate numbering system for textiles and another for plastics, and the guides fade, so the company advises replacing them regularly.

Ownership and influence

Since 2000 the company has named a Colour of the Year, which gets wide press coverage and is as much publicity as forecast. Pantone's lists, numbers and guides are its property, and it charges for them. In 2022 its colour libraries were removed from Adobe's design programs and put behind a subscription, to the annoyance of many designers. Governments and brands often state their colours in Pantone numbers, but an open equivalent in CIE Lab or sRGB values is needed for anything that must last independently of one company.

Sources and further reading

• Pantone on Wikipedia
• Pantone: Color systems explained
• Wired: Adobe Just Held a Bunch of Pantone Colors Hostage
• NPR: Does Pantone have a monopoly on colors?