This Year's Color

Case studY

pantone

© iStockphoto.com/Bill Noll / © iStockphoto.com/OSTILL

Chapter

7

thiS Year’S color: honeYSuckle

For many years, the Pantone Matching Systems (PMS) served as the standard in color matching and identification, with 1,114 solid, codified Pantone colors. Each color in the system is given a name and is shown with its corresponding ink formula number. The colors are organized in the iconic fan of Pantone color swatches, which caters to many designers who prefer doing color comparison and selection manually. The PMS color guides are printed using 13 base colors, selected and licensed by Pantone, plus black and clear white. Over time, Pantone has developed supplemental color-matching systems for various applications. As many printers use a four-color CMYK (cyan-magenta-yellowblack) system for printing, Pantone developed a conversion guide to help printers reproduce Pantone colors in the CMYK format where possible. It also created the HEXACHROME six-color printing system and another guide for correlating sRGB (red-green-blue) formulations with various Pantone colors for digital application. In 2007, Pantone released the Goe system, using ten base colors (four new, six original), which offered 2,058 color formulations, streamlined the color numbering into a more substantive hierarchy, and included sRGB-compatible software. In total, Pantone’s products offer over 10,000 unique colors for use in various industries. Pantone works hard to expand the functionality of its products. For example, Pantone recently created a handheld gadget called CAPSURE, which can be used to pull color samples from virtually any source. CAPSURE uses a tri-directional, image-capture system to eliminate color variations from texture and uneven lighting on a given surface and identify the color with an existing Pantone hue. Pantone also offers an iPhone app that can be used for isolating and identifying colors in photographs according to the Pantone color systems. While...