Pantone

Food for Thought - Pantone Colors

The Pantone Color Matching System is largely a standardized color reproduction system. By standardizing the colors, different manufacturers in different locations can all refer to the Pantone system to make sure colors match without direct contact with one another.

Pantone Shade GuideOne such use is standardizing colors in the CMYK process. The CMYK process is a method of printing color by using four inks—cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. The vast majority of the world's printed material is produced using the CMYK process, and there is a special subset of Pantone colors that can be reproduced using CMYK. Those that are possible to simulate through the CMYK process are labeled as such within the company's guides.

Color Matching System, or CMS, is a method used to ensure that colors remain as consistent as possible, regardless of the device/medium displaying the color. Keeping color from varying across mediums is very difficult because not only is color subjective to some extent, but also because devices use a wide range of technologies to display color.

However, most of the Pantone system's 1,114 spot colors cannot be simulated with CMYK but with 13 base pigments (15 including white and black) mixed in specified amounts.

The Pantone system also allows for many 'special' colors to be produced such as metallics and fluorescents. While most of the Pantone system colors are beyond the printed CMYK gamut, it was only in 2001 that Pantone began providing translations of their existing system with screen-based colors (Screen-based colors use the RGB—red, green, blue—system to create various colors). The GOE system has RGB and LAB values with each color.

Pantone colors are described by their allocated number (typically referred to as, for example, 'PMS 130'). PMS colors are almost always used in branding and have even found their way into government legislation (to describe the colors of flags).

For more information, please visit : http://www.pantone.com/pages/pantone/index.aspx

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