The Pantone Matching System is a color matching system used by printers and graphic artists to ensure reliable and stable colors. It standardizes colors and eliminates difficulties in color disparity. The system combines cyan, magenta, yellow, and black to create a single color and has a swatch book of thousands of colors. It only works for spot colors and is expensive to make. Pantone is expanding its color-matching capabilities to include home paint, textiles, fashion, and industrial design.
The Pantone Matching System is a proprietary color matching system that was introduced by the Pantone Corporation in 1963. It is used by many printers and graphic artists to provide the consumer with reliable and stable colors. There are some drawbacks to the Pantone Matching System, but for some applications it is the color matching method of choice. It is used all over the world to communicate color.
The Pantone Matching System standardizes colors. Many graphic designers struggle with the disparity between colors on their computer screen or in sample swatches and final printed products. In some cases, the color difference may be marginal, but in others, an entire print run would need to be aborted so that the color can be corrected. This is frustrating and costly. The Pantone Matching System is designed to eliminate some of these difficulties.
The Pantone Matching System combines cyan, magenta, yellow and key or black together to create a single color. Designers have a swatch book of thousands of Pantone colors to choose from. Each color has a specific number that a printer can look up to determine how the inks should be mixed. This way, the graphic designer can ensure that the color of his choice is reproduced in the finished product.
Some colors of the Pantone Matching System are famous all over the world. Tiffany Blue, for example, is also known as Pantone Color 1837. The distinctive blue color is a registered trademark of Tiffany. Several nations, including Scotland, have also used the Pantone Matching System to dictate the precise color of their national flags and military uniforms.
The main disadvantage of the Pantone Matching System is that it only works for spot colors. The Pantone company is working on a similar system for process colors, but is struggling. Process colors are much cheaper to produce than spot colors. Process printing involves making four passes with a press to lay down four separate colors of ink. Each ink adheres to a different printing plate, producing a full color image at the end of the fourth pass.
Because spot colors are mixed to specification, they are expensive to make and only practical when a project is printed in two or three colors. Applications for spot colors include event invitations and other text-oriented print projects or monochrome printing. Spot color is impractical for four-color brochures and other print projects with multiple colors.
The Pantone Matching System also doesn’t work for red, green, and blue color systems, as found on the Internet. The Pantone company is attempting to expand its color-matching capabilities and is expected to release a red, green, and blue color-matching system in the early twenty-first century. Pantone has also expanded its color matching expertise to include home paint, textiles, fashion and industrial design.
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