The 411 on Pantone

Pantone Sells Color Consistency

Let’s bust one major misconception about Pantone right now: Pantone does not own its colors. Pantone doesn’t make money by making people pay some kind of lease to use a specific color. What they sell is color consistency. Specifically, they sell a proprietary system they created that standardizes color by equating colors to numbers. And while the colors aren’t copyrighted, the system is.

Color consistency is vital for brands. They want people to recognize them just from their specific colors – even without the logo or name. The only way to do that is to make sure you see the exact same signature color every time you encounter the brand. That’s how it becomes a signature color, after all.

However, prior to Pantone, that was difficult. Printing shops, factories, and fabric manufacturers had their own color reference books, but they were all different. One shop might interpret, say, strawberry milkshake pink as a cool shade, while another would make it more like a warm peach.

Before Pantone, people would have to call these factories that were making their brand’s marketing materials and try to describe the exact color they needed. “Yeah, so we need it in a dark bottle green that’s almost army camouflage, but less military industrial complex and more laidback Pacific Northwest chic.” With Pantone, they can just say, “We’d like this poster in Pantone 3425 C.”

Pantone Has to Be Precise

The whole point of Pantone’s products is to serve as a benchmark against which a brand can measure all of its materials to ensure absolute consistency. You’re supposed to be able to hold your Pantone guide against the thing you’ve purchased – fabric, plastic, poster, whatever – and see that they match perfectly. Which means that those guides have to be accurate.

To ensure this, Pantone uses Delta E. This is not the name of a country singer or a special forces unit: it’s a standard measurement that clarifies how closely matched two colors are. The scale goes from 0 (the human eye can’t detect any difference) to 100 (this blue is green!) Pantone requires their products to fall below a maximum tolerance of 0.5 Delta E.

Ways to Number Colors

Pantone isn’t the only system that attempts to standardize colors using numbers. Two of the most common are CMYK and RGB.

CMYK

If your home printer has ever gone on strike because it’s out of magenta ink, you’ve encountered CMYK, aka process printing. CMYK is frequently used to print photography and magazines, since it’s a relatively low cost way to print a lot of different colors.

CMYK stands for cyan (C), magenta (M), yellow (Y), and black (K). (The K is for key, as black is typically used as the key color the other colors are all aligned – or “registered” – to.) CMYK overlays dots of these four colors to create a surprisingly versatile color range. Our brains interpret all those tiny dots as solid blocks of color.

Written out, each color has a value out of 100 – so C10 M100 Y70 K0 produces a dark magenta. The numbers actually equate to the size of the dot: the bigger the number, the bigger the dots in that color, and the stronger that color looks.

RGB

RGB stands for red, green, blue, because similar to CMYK, it combines these three base colors to create different colors. However, RGB is used specifically to make colors on screens.

This blending of colors happens at a pixel level: Each tiny pixel is split into three even tinier subpixels, one each of red, green, and blue. Your brain blurs them into one color, which is determined by the intensity of the separate colors.

You might have encountered RGB in the form of hex codes. These are a way of telling the computer how much of each color to use based on a numbering system called hexadecimal notation.

You can also express RGB in decimals that range from 0 (none of that color is present) to 255 (the maximum amount of that color.) For example, a decimal code of R128 G255 B128 is equivalent to a hex code of #80FF80, and creates a pale neony green.

Pantone’s Solid Colors

In contrast, Pantone creates solid colors. (Also called spot colors, but that’s confusing – dots and spots – so ignore it.) They are made by mixing Pantone’s proprietary base colors in different proportions. (Unlike most Pantone colors, the base colors have names as well as numbers.) For example, Pantone 4057 C is a PMS color made up of the Pantone base colors Rhodamine Red, Yellow 012, Violet, and Transparent White.

Pantone sells tools you can use to equate their colors to CMYK and RGB as closely as possible, and vice versa. However, Pantone’s solid colors tend to be more nuanced than RGB or CMYK colors, because they use a much more expansive palette – 18 base colors in the PMS, compared to just three or four.

Learn to Speak Pantone

Being the color nerds they are, Pantone couldn’t settle for just one system of categorizing colors. As we’ve seen from the different attempts to number colors, interpreting color across different media – printing versus screens – is hard. But even when you only focus on printing, as Pantone does, colors look different on different materials.

The same color on a glossy paper can look brighter than the exact same color ink printed on a matte paper, or on cotton, or nylon. So Pantone uses combinations of numbers and letters to indicate not just the color, but the material.

At first glance, it looks a little overwhelming, but it’s just a matter of learning what their specific codes mean. If I say that something happened at 05:17 on DEC 13 1989, you can immediately translate those numbers to a time and date, because you’ve learned what those numbers and letters mean when presented in that order. Pantone systems are the same – you just need to learn how to decode them.

Here’s a list of the different numbers and letters they use, and what they all mean, followed by examples.

(Pantone would want me to remind you that the colors displayed at these links are digital representations of the actual Pantone colors, probably in RGB, and that to understand what they actually look like, you need to buy the relevant Pantone product.)

Some Confusion About Trademarked Colors

First, I have to state the obvious and tell you that I’m not a lawyer and the following is not legal advice.

You’ll often see lists called things like “9 Pantone Colors You Didn’t Know Were Trademarked.” But most trademarks filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) don’t actually mention a Pantone color. For example, as of writing, Mattel has a trademark on a logo that says “Barbie” in a cursive font, that clarifies it uses “the color pink,” not a specific Pantone shade.

However, that doesn’t mean you can start using brands’ famous colors however you want. Don’t do that, unless you have a burning desire to be sued! Also, note that I’m only talking about trademarks filed in the US.

As we talked about earlier, brands love Pantone’s systems, because they make it easy to apply the exact same color everywhere you encounter the brand. For example, Mattel has used Pantone 219 C on its Barbie branding for decades and policed other company’s attempts to use it in similar contexts. This means that even though Mattel doesn’t name that Pantone color specifically in its logo trademark, they have ensured it’s commonly associated with Barbie – and that’s enough to earn it trademark protection in the eyes of the courts.

Certain brands do reference Pantone specifically in their trademarks. As of writing, UPS holds a trademark for “the color chocolate brown, which is the approximate equivalent of Pantone Matching System 462C” in the context of vehicles and uniforms.

Fun Pantone Facts

Pantone is very serious about color, but that doesn’t mean they can’t have fun too. Here are some interesting facts about the company.

How to Pronounce Pantone

It’s pan-tone – not to be confused with panettone (the Italian cake/bread) or Pantene (they make hair products.) Just me? OK.

Pantone means “all colors”: Pan is the Greek prefix meaning “of everything” or “all” (e.g. pandemic), and tone means a specific version of a color. (Technically, “tone” means a pure color – a hue – mixed with grey.)

Pantone’s Colorful History

Pantone started out in the 1950s as a printing company, but in 1962, it was acquired by one of its employees, Lawrence Herbert. Enormous color nerd Herbert was frustrated at having to laboriously mix his own inks from scratch to get the exact right color for each project. So he invented the Pantone Matching System (PMS), introducing it in a guide in 1963.

By 1968, Pantone had become the de facto color measurement system in the printing industry. That same year, they won a lawsuit against a copycat, successfully arguing that while no one can copyright individual colors, they can copyright a system that categorizes colors.

There is a Pantone Board Game

Want to test your color affinity? Bring home the Pantone Board Game. One player gets a card with a cultural reference on it (like Yoda or Marilyn Monroe), they pick five Pantone colors to represent it, and everyone else has to guess who/what it is. At least it’s shorter than Monopoly.

Who Chooses Pantone’s Famous Color of the Year?

Since 1999, Pantone has named a Color of the Year. Boldly, they do this in December, predicting the year ahead. The first ever color of the year – for the year 2000 – was Pantone 15-4020 Cerulean. (Which, appropriately, made it five years out of date when Miranda Priestly made that speech: IYKYK.)

The process of choosing Color of the Year is mysterious and vague – like how they choose popes. It’s chosen by members of the Pantone Color Institute (the Color of the Year, not the Pope, as far as I know), which is the arm of the company that works with brands to curate their Pantone palette.

Laurie Pressman, Vice President of the Pantone Color Institute, explains that the Color of the Year is intended to represent an interpretation of culture and trends. With an impressive dearth of humility, she has described the Color of the Year as, “a color that will resonate around the world, a color that reflects what people are looking for, a color that can hope to answer what they feel they need.”

The Pantone And Only

As mentioned, in addition to selling the tools needed to use their various systems, Pantone makes money by helping brands choose colors. They’ve also teamed up with some brands to create custom colors.

In 2001, Pantone turned jewelry company Tiffany & Co’s iconic robin’s egg blue into an exclusive Pantone color – Pantone 1837 C, named after the year Tiffany’s was founded. (Sidenote: Tiffany’s has trademarked their famous blue with the USPTO, but even they don’t reference Pantone in the trademark filings, preferring “robin’s egg blue” or Tiffany Blue.)

In 2015, Pantone teamed up with Minions – the lovably silly overalls-clad creatures from the “Despicable Me” series – to create Minion Yellow, otherwise known as Pantone 13-0851 TPG. Unlike Pantone 1837 C, however, Minion Yellow is available in some Pantone products, so you can reproduce it.

Brand Identity

Think you’ve got an eye for color? See if you can match these iconic Pantone colors to the famous brand.

Pantone Color Code	Approximate Representation	Brand
Pantone 3425 C	Click the color box to reveal the brand.	Starbucks
Pantone 1795 C and Pantone 7627 C	Click the color box to reveal the brand.	Netflix
Pantone 18-1663 TPX Chinese Red	Click the color box to reveal the brand.	Louboutin
Pantone 364 C and Pantone 109 C	Click the color box to reveal the brand.	John Deere
Pantone 219 C	Click the color box to reveal the brand.	Barbie

The Bottom Line

Pantone revolutionized the way people work together by creating a shared language of color. And contrary to popular belief, they don’t own their colors (not directly, at least.) Although they are not without their critics, they have made it easier for brands, creators, and manufacturers to communicate and turn the colors in their heads into reality. And you can’t shade them for that.