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,

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.