what are Pantone colours and how can they charge you for them?

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I admittedly don’t use photoshop or anything of the sort and I’ve only first heard of Pantone in the last day or so.

I’m seeing that they’ve put up a paywall for their colours, but I cant understand how they have a business model which is based around licensing colours? What is their business model, why are they charging for colours, why is it significant?

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4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Years ago, Pantone sold a physical set of cards, much like the cards for paint colors you see at Home Depot. Same idea: If you called out a specific Pantone color (by its number), you were sure of an exact color match. We built retrofit displays for aircraft cockpits. Often our display would sit side-by-side with the competitor’s display we were replacing, so the colors of any symbol on our display had to be a darn good match with theirs, or the customer wouldn’t accept it. We’d get a competitor’s display, keep trying cards till it looked like a good match, then specify colors (by its number) to our software engineers.

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