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How Pantone Is Still Turning Color into Money (2015)
- amelius 10y agoI wish some company would do for odor what Pantone has done for color.
- tangue 10y agoThis is really a great startup idea. From a unicorn perspective it won't do, but what a beautiful business it would be.
- rleigh 10y agoIt'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 10y ago"04-tpx-fecal was really heinous. Can I get a sample?"
- hammock 10y agoInternational 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 http://fragranceingredients.iff.com/ingredients.aspx
- criley2 10y agoThese 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.
- Bromskloss 10y agoI'm still not sure how they are making money.
- TheBiv 10y agoThey sell these color fans which almost every designer uses. http://www.pantone.com/graphics/pantone-matching-system?from=topNav http://www.pantone.com/graphics/pantone-matching-system?from...
- rangibaby 10y agoThey 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 10y agoColor 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.
- keithly 10y agoTIL there's a standard for dirt color matching.
- rleigh 10y agoThis 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 10y agoif you're a designer, a painter, anything to do with printed media at all you use pantone, and thus you pay for it
- irodoramatic 10y ago
- bobjordan 10y agoWhen 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 10y agoI'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 10y agoDecisions about color are made all the time in some industries.
- pjc50 10y agoThe 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.
- ghaff 10y agoIt may also be worth pointing out that designers tend to be pretty fanatical about fine gradations of color to a degree that can seem a bit silly to non-designers. I still remember when I was managing a small school press shop way back when, you'd get in these jobs from serious designers that would be printed in two shades of a color that I could barely tell apart.
- stdbrouw 10y 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. I realize it's an off-topic nitpick, but that's not actually true. You take the average of all watches, and this will be your best guess for what time it really is. So having two watches really is better than just one, and three watches provides no guarantee of perfect accuracy.
- onion2k 10y agoPantone 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.
- cs702 10y agoTL; 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.
- callesgg 10y agoThe 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.
- cptskippy 10y 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).
- callesgg 10y agoThat 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.
- chrisbennet 10y agoI 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.
- cheath 10y ago#1 is definitely a problem. However, does RGB/CMYK/Hex not solve this?
- Vraxx 10y agoHmmm, 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.
- latchkey 10y agoCMYK 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 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.
- shocks 10y ago> CMYK is a subset of Pantone. This is not really true. They're different things. One is spot colour, one is process colour. Process colour - lots of very small dots/splodges/lines made of just a few ink colours (typically Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black). Spot colour - ink that is that colour. There is no room for intepretation with spot colour. It is the colour it is. Even CMYK can be a "different" colour. Different printers (both people and the machines) can print CMYK differently. It is possible to print CMYK without the K, for example. It's very difficult to see the difference and it saves a chunk of money on ink. The output is a different colour though. ;)
- benmorris 10y agoI 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 10y agoNo, Bloomberg, I will not turn off my Ad Blocker.