Everything you need to know about Pantone

The color model "Panton", developed by the American company Pantone, is considered a reference catalog with a rich palette of various shades. Having a lot of catalogs, it is designed for different printing conditions. The material in this article will help the reader understand what the Pantone is, what its fan is needed for and how to use it.

Under Pantone, it is customary to understand a kind of system that allows you to select the desired tone from a huge catalog system. This is a popular worldwide color model, which is considered universal and suitable for any kind of activity. In fact, it is a universally used standardized system for the identification and selection of colors or the generally accepted standard of colors for the whole world.

There was a color palette when the public print began to switch to a color format. At this time, there was an urgent need to select a quality palette, but there was no single standard for the production of goods according to new criteria. Complicated matter is the fact that printing houses were scattered around the world. Pantone developed a unified palette, assigning a specific code number to each color of a huge system. It consisted of Latin letters and numbers, so that the same color could be used anywhere in the world.

This allowed us to order printing of printing, without fear of getting distortion of the final product. Each Pantone shade could be created using the specified CMYK base color ratio in order to produce a specific half tone.

The urgency and the importance of obtaining the exact shade was fundamental for the corporate identity of any company. The customer could choose a specific tone of printing from the catalog, without fear that the artist will understand the color in his own way. In other words, the emergence of Pantone has simplified life for many. Today, printing houses require layouts in this system.

These are catalogs of various colors for orientation in the CMYK system. The system has not only a classification, but also special directories, called fans. Depending on what they are for, the manufacturer may offer them for various materials, for example, textiles, plastic, paper. For paper, reference books are divided into their own subspecies: for offset, coated, coated matte, and glossy.

However, the information is not limited only to fans, it can be presented in electronic form. This is convenient for designers who can export it to various programs.

In view of this, the print design often acquires brightness and seems unusual.

The pantone color palette is rich in shades that are reproduced through process colors. The use of such a palette is convenient for the development of printing design, because when printing on dies there will be no differences in color. Moreover, you can achieve the desired color not for a few, but for one run. This fact speaks of savings, which is relevant when ordering printing.

The system uses digital identification of shades for printing with mixed and triad inks. Colors-standards are numbered in a book with fan folding.

It is also noteworthy that the samples can be very different, but the manufacturer insists that the fan be updated every year. According to him, over the year, the colors wear out and fade, and therefore become inaccurate. Since August 2007, Pantone has been purchased by X-Rite, a company that manufactures color management equipment and software.

The representation of colors in the Pantone table may be different. For example, it can be a code consisting of three pairs of hexadecimal digits in which each pair has its own color value. In addition, colors can be classified by means of keywords (say, green, black, rose). If the browser does not understand a word, the spectrum of tones is reduced by choosing only basic ones that are understandable for all browsers.

The RGBa format is different from the previous format. It lies in the fact that the latter value determines the level of transparency or alpha channel. It is set to a fractional value from 0 to 1.

The palette includes more than 8000 different color shades. In this case, one source color may have different degrees of saturation and vary in temperature. It can be cold or warm, bright, dim, bleached. Especially important pantonnik for printing, where even a slight change in color can ruin all the work.

The mysterious table or the so-called catalog is presented in the form of longitudinal sheets of paper, painted in specific colors.

This is very convenient for the user, as he has the ability to select a particular tone of a particular color, having all the necessary shades in one place in front of him. No matter how many they are, it does not interfere with perception, but it helps to reduce the time for the selection of the desired shade.

The systematics is such that the leaf is divided into zones of the same color, which change the degree of saturation, starting with a dark tone and ending with the bleached one. A conditional fan formed by pantone flowers may begin with a yellow color, followed by ocher, then orange, coral, pink, lilac, and purple. So it can go on to almost black.

Each year, the company nominates some color in the first place, considering it as the favorite of the whole palette. The color is not chosen at random: representatives of the company monitor the state of the planet in the field of economics, ecology, psychology and society. Based on the data obtained, they associate a specific color with them. For example, the color of the millennium in 1999 was chosen to be sky blue, after a few years (in 2005) purple was the best color of the year. After another 4 years, Mimosa won, after two years, Honeysuckle, in 2014, the victory was given to the shining “shining orchid”.

The institute, engaged in experimental work with color, is sure that it has an impact on various areas of life: not only fashion or printing, but also advertising, cinema, graphic, landscape design and other industries.

In view of this feature, fan layouts are printed in two versions - coated and uncoated.

As for the translation of RGB and CMYK, these color spaces are tied to a specific printing technique. RGB corresponds to the colors of the diodes on the monitor screen, CMYK corresponds to the ink shades used in a particular printer or another type of printing equipment. However, colors never translate perfectly into each other. They are rigidly tied to a specific technique of creation and are practically not suitable for working with blending inks.

Calibrator shades Pantone allows for the selection of the desired color, eliminating minor inaccuracies and differences in tonality. For the basis of any design or layout take the current color, nominated in this year in the first place. This may be the color of the font in the printing headers, a geometric shape in graphic design, an interior element or a piece of clothing, as well as an interface element, a font, highlighting of significant information in the article.

In addition, it allows you to focus on the finished clear colors, if you need to find a harmonious companion to a particular shade. It is not difficult to determine this, moreover, you can also be guided by the colors on the catwalk - they are always a kind of indicator of the newest color trends that will be used in all branches of design.

For example, this season, the bet is on the color instilling confidence, a charge of energy and vitality. Today there is no clear division into male and female, which speaks of gender independence. It is important that the current palette speaks about strengthening in society, this is expression, dynamics and energy.

This gives a special energy, allows you to achieve unique combinations by varying the degree of saturation of the two companions. The model of a triad combination is based on the principle of a triangle, and at the same time, colors are selected at its conditional vertices. The combination turns out to be unusual, but not devoid of harmony, even if muffled shades are chosen for the design.

In addition, the combination may be similar, in which two or three shades are used, located side by side on the color wheel. The separate complementary combination is built on a different principle. In this case, the ideal companions for a particular color are adjacent tones to the one that is located exactly opposite the specified color.

If these schemes seem to the average person difficult, you can pay attention to the compatibility of individual shades, for example:

• white color is universal and goes well with all shades of color palette;

• beige harmoniously looks together with blue, brownish, emerald, wine and neutral tones (black, gray, silver);

• Gray gets emotional coloring when it is supplemented with sandy, woody, purple, burgundy, pink or blue;

• pink the color is a harmonious duet with mint, white, olive hues, as well as a neutral gray tone;

• turquoise can be decorated with a shade of fuchsia, cherry red, brownish, cream, saturated purple;

• purple looks quite harmonious if you combine it with orange, pinkish, olive, gray or white;

• lime color is in harmony with gray, brown, orange, sunny brown;

• Orange can be combined with red, blue, mint, as well as white or black.

Determining the number of the desired color is easy: as a rule, it is signed with the personal pantone code or has the HTML code. For example, the inscription “PANTONE Yellow 012” or the code “# FFD200” may appear near the desired shade of yellow.

If the shade needs to be determined in the printing house, it is even easier to choose the desired option: just use the existing catalog. As for the electronic version, there may be discrepancies in semitones, which is explained by the backlight of the monitor. If the customer doubts the accuracy of the tones, he can take his palette and look at a sample of the color produced, checking the shades.

What is Pantone and how to use it, see below.