How Pantone Is Still Turning Color into Money (2015)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-26/how-pantone-is-still-turning-color-into-money

by bpierre • 10 years ago

40 69 10 years ago

bloomberg.com

amelius• 10 years ago

I wish some company would do for odor what Pantone has done for color.

tangue• 10 years ago

This is really a great startup idea. From a unicorn perspective it won't do, but what a beautiful business it would be.

rleigh2• 10 years ago

It's already done. As you might expect, the food and drink industry have a need for this. In the brewery I worked at in 1998, we had a commercial set in our "taste training" room which was a set of defined things to smell/taste for training the palate for subtle but specific flavours.

kchoudhu• 10 years ago

"04-tpx-fecal was really heinous. Can I get a sample?"

hammock• 10 years ago

International Flavors & Fragrances, the world's largest manufacturer of "odors" has a search where you can choose family (Amber, Animalic, Aromatic, Balsamic, Citrus, Floral, Fresh, Fruity, Gourmand, Green, Herbal, Mossy, Powdery, Spicy, Woody) and emotion (Air, Contrasted, Exhilarating, High Tech, Intimate, Mystical, Nature, None, Opulent, Primitive, Tasty).

http://fragranceingredients.iff.com/ingredients.aspx

criley2• 10 years ago

These kinds of services exist for flavor, absolutely, and I imagine they must also exist for odor (probably similar companies since so much of flavor is odor).

I'm reminded of the silly Comedy Central show Nathan For You (where a comedian provides outlandish business advice to actual small businesses) where Nathan found a flavoring company to uniquely design a poop flavored frozen yogurt as a publicity stunt.

I imagine an odoring business exists, but just isn't consumer facing, rather sells to brands we know, so we don't know who they are.

Bromskloss2• 10 years ago

I'm still not sure how they are making money.

TheBiv• 10 years ago

They sell these color fans which almost every designer uses.

http://www.pantone.com/graphics/pantone-matching-system?from...

rangibaby• 10 years ago

They sell color books. You have to (according to them lol) buy a new one every few years because the samples fade and change over time.

was_boring• 10 years ago

Color fading is a real concern in many industries. I have an old munsell book (the standard for coloring dirt) from a retired geologist and it's no where near the color in new copies.

rleigh2• 10 years ago

This is not surprising. The chemical compounds used for the colours will degrade over time, either from direct illumination, or degradation by oxidation, or some other process. This will lead to subtle change in the colours, and if you care about accuracy, you'll need to replace them.

cp9• 10 years ago

if you're a designer, a painter, anything to do with printed media at all you use pantone, and thus you pay for it

irodoramatic• 10 years ago

I was under the impression that they also sold ink, but turns out that's not the case. Their parent company, X-Rite, sells electronic equipment for measuring and calibrating colour, but that seems like a smaller, more specialty business than Pantone brand. Licensing the brand for products must be lucrative enough on its own.

Finnucane• 10 years ago

What you are paying for is what you usually pay for: convenience and consistency. When you send a print job off to the printer, you tell the printer what you expect to see. For many years, the easiest way, for solid spot colors, was specify the Pantone color. You knew what you were looking at in your office was what the press operator was seeing. But it does seem like in these days when reliable digital color calibration tools are available at affordable prices, that it would be easier to not rely on the Pantone color books, at least for anything that could be spec'd in standard CMYK.

realo• 10 years ago

They sell color "standards". And this applies not just to printed matter, but also to colored objects.

You have different books for "Matte" and "Glossy" and also one for "Fabrics".

cptskippy7• 10 years ago

I'm sure you've printed things from color printer and noticed the colors didn't look the same as on screen, or from one printer to the next, or held to computer monitors side by side and noticed color differences. As I type this, I'm sitting in front of two identical Dell monitors of the exact same revision and the color temperatures are completely off. They look fine on their own but side by side the colors look off.

For businesses, accurate color reproduction is essential for brand recognition, brand perception, and reputation. IBM's blue and T-Mobile magenta are pretty iconic. It would look pretty silly if you had a meeting with IBM and the business cards you got handed all had a different shade of blue and none of them match the letterhead on the meeting agenda the provided. Or you walked into a T-Mobile store and the magenta on the walls didn't match the placards, the floor, the employee uniforms, nametags, or the sign hanging in the window.

There are color calibration devices, like the color scanner in the paint section at Home Depot, that are used to calibrate monitors, printers, and everything else but they're useless without a reference point to calibrate to. That's where Pantone comes in. Pantone produces a standard catalog of colors that people can reference. Additionally they license the catalog to software and hardware manufacturers for color matching purposes.

When you take a Pantone color swatch and pull out a color, open Photoshop and paint a swatch of that color and print on an Epson Pantone printer and an HP Pantone printer, those prints are going to match the swatch from Pantone.

Pantone sells consistency.

Bromskloss2• 10 years ago

So far, so good, but it seems to me like many others would be able to manufacture such calibration devices. I mean, the CIE colour space is known to everybody.

bobjordan• 10 years ago

When you need to be right about color, you pay for it. I've paid close to $1000 USD for official Pantone color guides over the last few years.

johnward• 10 years ago

I'm not sure I understand. What do you have to be right about? I would assume if a brand has a registered pantone color they know the code? Why do you need a book?

I'm no designer but it seems like Pantone created a solution then convinced everyone else there was a problem.

Zikes• 10 years ago

Decisions about color are made all the time in some industries.

pjc502• 10 years ago

The man with two watches knows that one of them is wrong, but only the man with three watches knows what time it really is.

Similarly, it's possible to say "these printed things and signs are different colours", but only with a reference can you say which one is the wrong colour, authoritively enough to complain to whoever forgot to colour-correct their part of the process.

And of course a brand has to pick a Pantone colour in the first place, for which they will want a reference book.

louprado• 10 years ago

When a company's brand matures and color consistency matters, their commercial printer or graphic artist will recommend the Pantone Matching System (PMS). Any graphic artist that doesn't invest in a Pantone color fan/swatch-book will lose promising accounts.

Also a good press operator will at times use the PMS to mix existing colors in their inventory to closely match the target color. Ideally you would use the exact ink, but this isn't always possible given the tight constraints of running a commercial print business.

ghshephard• 10 years ago

Color is important (obviously) in the design process, and, honestly, in the whole scheme of things, a $1500 pantone reference per design shop (or more if you have a lot of designers), is round off error when you have staffing costs in the 7 figures.

mattkevan• 10 years ago

Back when I did a lot of print design, the Pantone colour books were some of the most useful tools I had.

Pantone were around long before design went digital, starting as a method for printers to systematise the production of coloured inks, and the Pantone system is still the way printers manage and talk about colour. Pantone only moved into the digital space fairly recently with the advent of DTP.

Colour management for print is complex - colours appear very differently when printed on different paper stocks, especially coated or uncoated paper. And it's almost impossible to get an accurate preview until you're on the press itself - when it's way too late to make changes. Having the Pantone books which show what the colours look like on different stocks at the start of a project is enormously helpful.

Also CMYK print has a much narrower colour gamut compared to RGB - greens and oranges are especially hard to reproduce - so it's not unusual to specify extra colours where colour accuracy and vibrancy is important - such as on a logo. These colours will be Pantones, and often specified to the printer with a torn-out colour chip.

High-end printing is done using the Hexachrome process, which adds orange and green to the standard CMYK. This gives a much wider colour gamut - and is developed by Pantone.

It's a shame it's not an open standard.

onion2k• 10 years ago

Pantone is a example of how a good standard can generate value; in Pantone's case it's the standard for print color consistency. It's a shame that the standard is closed and proprietary but it's a good example nonetheless.

tenken• 10 years ago

well until we get rid of Economics as a civilization ... we just have to live with it. Nothing is Free in this world.

wolfgke2• 10 years ago

Nothing is Free in this world.

You mix "free as in freedom" and "free as in beer" here.

cs702• 10 years ago

TL; DR: Pantone has a monopoly on print color standards. If you want printed colors to match screen colors, you have little choice but to use Pantone.

callesgg2• 10 years ago

The way I see Pantone is they charge money to guarantee that a colored piece of fabric always looks the same. I can go to Pantone in 10 years and say give me a piece of 16-1234-tcx they will give me that and it will look exactly the same as the previous sample I had. Coloring fabrics is not as easy as coloring stuff on a screen.

cptskippy7• 10 years ago

Coloring fabrics is not as easy as coloring stuff on a screen.

eh.... both on nontrivial tasks.

Two identical RGB monitors side by side will not match and even after being color matched using expensive tooling, they will not stay matched for long. Getting two monitors from two different manufacturers, or even different revisions of the same product, requires considerable effort.

On top of that the color space used by applications may not match, and may not be compatible with the monitors. I always enjoy the color match game of receiving a graphic from our art department because they rarely have their tooling set to the RGB colorspace when they produce their graphics. So depending on which browser you view the graphic in and on which platform you view it you'll end up with wildly different colors. Because some browsers take into account the monitor color profile and others don't, and Macs do a better job with color than Windows which does an infinitely better job with color than Linux (Android).

callesgg2• 10 years ago

That is one way of seeing it.

The way i tend to look at colors in a computer is as following as long as you use sRGB, LAB or possibly even CMYK then it is up to the OS to show that correctly.

In reality every device will have different background light, different settings, different manufacturing process and the list continues there is just no way all the parameters can be accounted for.

If you develop for the web or another multi platform environment you cant expect colors to be spectrally same from device to device. AS such you can not and should not develop applications that has that presumption.

Only in very specific controlled environments can one make the assumption that a color is what it is and not a representation.

So coloring in a computer is easy cause the rules of the "game" is defined. Show a specific sRGB color and that is what it is. If you have a bad screen that wont show that color that is not my problem.

BTW the "RGB colorspace" is not a specific thing it is an idea, dont ever refer to such a thing if you want to be productive.

giovannibajo1• 10 years ago

Honest question: can you explain how Linux does a worse job with colors?

chrisbennet• 10 years ago

I did some computer graphics consulting for them years ago and learned a bit about what they do. Here's a couple use cases as they were explained to me:

1. Say you want to print my Coca Cola posters in China. As a designer you could send them a swatch of paper with the right color OR I can just tell them the Pantone color.

2. Say you design something on your computer but you need to determine if you can actually print it. The software I worked on would let you compare the color gamut of various devices i.e. let you know if the item you designed could be printed/rendered on a certain printer or T-shirts.

cheath4• 10 years ago

#1 is definitely a problem. However, does RGB/CMYK/Hex not solve this?

Vraxx• 10 years ago

Hmmm, based on his other problem, my speculation would be that not areas have the exact same printer tones with the same hex/rgb values in software? It does seem a bit strange if that were the case though.

latchkey2• 10 years ago

CMYK is a subset of Pantone. CMYK is essentially the color space for printed things. RGB doesn't convert 1:1 to CMYK and even lies outside of Pantone in some spots.

Here is a good link that explains things a bit: http://www.printernational.org/rgb-versus-cmyk.php

I'm in the t-shirt printing business and this is a major issue with artwork that we print. Explaining to people that we can't print their RGB image with the exact colors in it is a major pain.

When you're taking bottles of ink off the shelf and mixing them, you just are not going to be able to represent all the colors in the RGB space.

theatrus2• 10 years ago

In what color space? Is this in the target color space? What printer do they have? Are you doing offset printing? 4-color? On what paper? etc.

Pantone colors are such a system, with very exact control over what you get.

shocks5• 10 years ago

Well you definitely shouldn't be using RGB/Hex for print. Lots of these colours cannot actually be printed, and there are different algorithms for converting them to printable formats (that give different results).

As for CMYK, there is a difference between spot and process colour. CMYK is process colour, made of lots of small spots of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink. There are different ways you can do this and you will get different effects. For example you could have grids of dots, but you could have the grids at different angles.

Spot colour (pantone) is just ink that is that colour. You get exactly the same every time, no matter the printer.

pjc502• 10 years ago

Absolutely not. RGB values tell you surprisingly little about what something will look like on a screen, as screens have different colour profiles. Similarly print processes aren't linear either, especially across different materials. Then you have to consider things which aren't printed in any sense like injection moulded plastic. And as others have pointed out there are different "gamuts", so that RGB and CMYK don't even represent the same set of colours. That's before you consider colours like International Klein Blue: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/klein-ikb-79-t01513/text... (has to be seen in person as it's not a web-reproducible colour)

Accurate colour reproduction, that enables you to get half a dozen things made in different parts of the world then put them next to one another and have them look the same, is a really tricky process control problem.

(One of the historical reasons Apple were popular with designers is that they do care about colour accuracy and things made on a Mac will generally look the same on other Macs unless you've fiddled with the calibration yourself. PC OEMs and Microsoft don't care about this.)

wolfhumble• 10 years ago

The type of paper you are using (matte, un/coated) will also have an effect on how the color will be presented, so it is often useful to use a physical color guide were colors are printed on different stocks. See: http://www.pantone-colours.com

cptskippy7• 10 years ago

RGB is a light color system and CMYK is a pigment color system, conversion between the to is not 1:1. However on properly calibrated monitors and printers, Pantone Cornflower blue is the same.

pipio21• 10 years ago

Not really.

A real color is a mixture of reflected wavelengths and more, for example a fluorescent marker is that, fluorescent, you give it UV light and you get green.

A real color in real life behaves different depending on the light that illuminates it, and the angle of incidence.

RGB and CMYK is display-specific primary inks dependent. There are spaces for device independence colors. They work well for cinema and places were illumination is controlled and restricted.

Pantone let you control a color over a broad range of circumstances on the real world, like color of a shirt at the sunset.

It looks like the stupidest of things, but a client buys you a suit that looks great at the shop but bad on his house or office illumination and he will ask for a refund.

The same thing with a big poster on a building on London weather(totally different than on Madrid or Rome).

todd8• 10 years ago

A big issue is that the human eye doesn't have R, G, and B sensors with well defined boundaries. Light frequencies that stimulate the cones receptors in the eyes cover a range of wavelengths from about 400nm to 700nm, see the first figure at Wikipedia's page on spectral sensitivity [1]. The three types of cones have largely overlapping sensitivity to light.

Light entering the eye can be thought of as having a range of wavelengths over the visible spectrum. A red source of light might be pure red, with a single wavelength right at the peak sensitivity for the red cone receptor of the human eye, but it might also be, and in most cases will be, a mixture of wavelengths some stronger some weaker falling across the visible spectrum that happen to stimulate the red cones more than the blue or green cones.

Visible light, made up of a collection of wavelengths, can be described as an intensity curve for each wavelength, that is, a real valued intensity function of wavelength. However, the brain is incapable of knowing the shape of this curve, it only knows how much each of the three types of cones are being stimulated. Two very different "colors" having wildly different distribution of wavelengths might be perceived as exactly the same by the human eye. Furthermore, the brain does a bunch of processing that changes the perceived color in strange ways, see for example, the Land effect [2], named after E. H. Land (creator of Polaroid cameras) because of his work on understanding it.

Finally, why isn't RGB enough? Each Pantone color, say Pantone Coated Warm Red C, does have an exact RGB (or CMYK) value, in this case #F9423A. The problem is that pigments in inks and pixels in cameras and the pixels in screens all generate or are sensitive to specific sets of wavelengths that won't exactly correspond with each other or with the sensitivity of human eyes. This is why we need color profiles and color spaces and all of the concomitant complications (especially so since the functions involved are not simple linear transforms).

A sophisticated enough sensing device could be constructed to exactly mimic the sensitivity of the human eye. It could report the apparent color of any object, say a fabric swatch, in three dimensions, say R, G, and B. Such a device could be used to compare a color in China with on in New York. It's just more convenient to use the ubiquitous color swatch strips produced by Pantone and match the colors by eye, and by now, one can simply load your offset printing press with ink matching Pantone Coated Warm Red C straight from the ink manufacturer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_sensitivity

[2] http://www.millenuvole.org/f/Fotografia/Per-quali-ragioni-ve...

benmorris• 10 years ago

I do software in the sign and digital graphics industry. We rely on Pantone to make sure what we produce matches what the customer (usually somewhere else in the world) expects. For this reason it is incredibly helpful to have a standard. The swatch books are expensive though.

strathmeyer• 10 years ago

No, Bloomberg, I will not turn off my Ad Blocker.

How Pantone Is Still Turning Color into Money (2015)

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