Pantone Color Chart

 

The Pantone color chart takes its name from the company the produces it. Let's layout a bit of history first. Pantone Inc. is a corporation headquartered in Carlstadt, New Jersey, USA.

 

The company is best known for its Pantone Matching System (PMS), a proprietary color space used in a variety of industries, primarily printing, though sometimes in the manufacture of colored paint, fabric and plastics.

 

 

The company's primary products include the Pantone Guide or Pantone color chart.

 

It consists of a large number of small (approximately 6×2 inches or 15×5 cm) thin cardboard sheets, printed on one side with a series of related color swatches and then bound into a small flipbook.

 

For instance, a particular "page" might contain a number of yellows of varying tints.

 

 

The idea behind the PMS is to allow designers, and artists in general to 'color match' specific colors when a design enters production stage—regardless of the equipment used to produce the color.

 

This system has been widely adopted by graphic designers, reproduction and printing houses for a number of years now.

 

Pantone recommends that the "Pantone color chart" should be purchased annually as its inks become more yellow over time. Color variance also occurs within editions based on the paper stock used (coated, matte or uncoated), while inter-edition color variance occurs when there are changes to the specific paper stock used.

 

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.

 

One 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 Pantone color chart.

 

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 color chart also include many 'special' colors such as metallics and fluorescents.

It is only in 2001 that Pantone began providing translations of their existing system with screen based colors (RGB and Lab)

 

Pantone colors are described by their allocated number (typically referred to as, for example, 'PMS 130').

 

Pantones are almost always used in branding and have even found their way into government legislation (to describe the colors of flags).

pantone color chart

 

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