Eli5: What does Pantone do?

Question

All I know about Pantone is that they created a bunch of named colors. That’s cool, but how has a color-naming company stuck around for so long? How do they make money? How do they fit into the larger picture?

In: Economics

Answer 1

It’s not about naming colours; it’s about *defining* specific colours. This might not seem a big deal, until you think about how production chains work, and how colour spaces work.

For example, when you look at an object like a magazine the colours you see are made up of a combination of cyan, magenta, yellow and black dyes. If you don’t have any colours inked on you are left with white paper, if you add all the colours you get black. If you look up the magazines website on your phone or laptop and look at the same images the colours on your screen are made up of red, green and blue pixels. If they’re all at maximum brightness you see white light, if they’re all off you see the black screen for the laptop.

So those two colour systems use different approaches, and you need different mixes of different things to create the same colour. That means you need to very carefully define exactly what a colour is for designers to match one system to another. This gets even more important and useful when you think about colouring plastics, paints, inks, etc etc; as these all use different colouring components. So if you’re making say a car, and you want the bodywork paint to match the plastic of the trim, or the logo on the badge to match the logo printed on the service document which matches the logo on the website you need to have a defined colour which can then be matched to.

Even more importantly, if one thing is created in one factory, and another in another (possibly in another country) you need a way of all of them having access to the same standard colour.

This is what PANTONE provide. Essentially, you can order swatch books of thousands of different colours, your design team in one office can specify which colours they want, then a factory elsewhere, with a matching set of swatches can compare the identical colour and mix pigments for the appropriate meterial until they match it.

So when, say, Cocal Cola want their red anywhere, they say “make this in PANTONE 485c”. And the can manufactorers, the bottle label printers, the vending machine makers, the signwriters, the ad printers, the website designers etc etc etc all hit exactly the same colour.