How Pantone Became the World Authority on Color: NPR

Every year Pantone selects a color to reflect the trends, moods and events of the zeitgeist.

Pantone Color Institute

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Pantone Color Institute

Every year since the turn of the millennium, the news comes from above: Pantone, the self-proclaimed global authority on color, announces its color of the year.

On Thursday, Pantone declared “Mocha Mousse” the color for 2025.

The “evocative soft brown tone” or “warming rich brown tone,” the company said in a press release, “nourishes with its suggestion of the delicious quality of cocoa, chocolate and coffee and speaks to our desire for comfort.”

By revealing a hue that aims to reflect culture through color language, Pantone also predicts the next design trends.

The earthy color taps into “a growing movement to bring us into harmony with the natural world,” the press release says.

Pantone’s color of the year is intended to capture the spirit of the times, said Laurie Pressman, vice president of the Pantone Color Institute. At the same time, it should also serve as a cultural antidote.

“It’s emblematic of a snapshot in time and gives people what they think they need – that this color can hope to find an answer,” Pressman said. “We measure the temperature: what is happening in the world around us and how is this expressed in the language of colors?”

“And when we did our research for this year, what we saw most were people who were looking for harmony and living lives of harmony,” she said, and the need to feel “grounded.”

In response to the annual color selection, fashion and interior designers, marketers and creatives are incorporating the pigment into their products to stay on trend. As part of the campaign, brands partner with Pantone to earn money by owning a color.

However, you can expect to see a lot more brown in the area.

But Pantone isn’t the only company to develop a standardized set of colors, nor is it the first to give colors names. What makes Pantone such a color expert?

From the beginning, Pantone recognized the need to represent colors accurately. More importantly, it knew how to sell it.

How Pantone set the industry standard

Before it became the color giant it is today, Pantone was a commercial printing company under another name. When Lawrence Herbert, a printing technician with a chemistry background, was hired by the company in the 1950s, he recognized a recurring problem in his work.

When requesting print copies, brochures or posters, customers had difficulty being precise about color. To get the color they were looking for, as Herbert’s son Richard, a former president of Pantone, told NPR Planet money They would have to send in an actual color sample at the beginning of the year.

“Our most famous thing was: Cut a piece off their tie, send it to the print and say, Match this color,” Richard said. “They had their own ink formula books and could get close. But it was very random.”

In 1963, Lawrence founded the solution. He developed the Pantone Matching System (PMS) to standardize color reproduction so that printed copies matched the original regardless of the printing device. He received approval for his color standard from ink manufacturers, first in the USA and later in Europe and Asia.

Pantone expanded its pigment range and in 1968 it became the industry standard.

Pressman credits the astute marketer Herbert for making Pantone a widely accepted color system.

“He understood that this is a problem that occurs in printing and that affects many other industries as well,” Pressman said.

Customers from a wide range of industries knocked on Pantone’s door for help achieving color consistency, often before Pantone had developed a way to do it. According to the company’s vice president, there was a need in the market for custom color development and Pantone adapted.

As other industries such as fashion and home turned to Pantone to get the right color combination, the company shifted from paper to textiles and developed new color formats that could be transferred to a variety of materials. Today the color library includes more than 10,000 different colors.

The Color of the Year campaign, supported by the PR department, provided Pantone with another opportunity to sell its proprietary colors through the recipe books and color palettes the company sells or through brand deals and partnerships.

Some of its famous brand colors belong to major brands. Both Target’s bold red and Tiffany & Co.’s Robin Egg Blue are part of the Pantone color family.

Pantone’s predecessors were based on the need to describe the natural world

A color chosen to match the natural world is appropriate given the history of modern color systems.

Robert Ridgway

Smithsonian Archives

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Smithsonian Archives

Before Pantone made its color standard a big business, some of the first modern color systems came from naturalists trying to identify and distinguish species of birds or flowers in reference books called color dictionaries.

Color systems have been around since at least the 17th century, but in the 19th century, an ornithologist named Robert Ridgway questioned some of the existing color nomenclature, according to Daniel Lewis, the author The Feathered Tribea biography of Ridgway.

In his 1912 self-published work entitled Color standards and color nomenclature, Expanding on his first color book in 1886, Ridgway wrote that “the nomenclature of colors remains vague and meaningless for practical purposes, thereby seriously hindering progress in almost all branches of industry and research.”

He condemned the indescribable and confusing names of popular colors, Lewis wrote, including “baby blue,” “London smoke,” “ashes of roses,” and “elephant breath.”

Ridgway’s color dictionary of over 1,000 colors included hues that referenced birds, such as “Jay Blue,” while others were derived from fruits—”Apple Green”—or the natural environment, as in “Storm Grey.”

His color book “evolved into the Pantone color chart,” Lewis said. According to Lewis’ 2012 book, Ridgway’s Colors are still used today by mycologists, philatelists and food colorists.

But his color mixing system was technically flawed, subject to the whims of natural elements, and never found widespread use.

A 2016 article in Hyperallergic, an online art magazine, quotes a 1985 review published by the Beta Beta Beta Biological Society: “Color standards There are no precise descriptions of how the colors are reproduced. In addition to this problem, Ridgway chose some pigments that were not as durable as he had hoped, but were affected by moisture, abrasion and hue shifting.”

Another advantage that Pantone has over its competitors is that it knows how to tell stories about colors and arrange them in an understandable way.

“You can’t copyright a word. But when you organize words in a certain way, they tell a story, and a unique story at that. The same applies to colors. You cannot copyright a color. But you know, when you create this arrangement of colors that creates a system that is protectable and copyrightable.

Because its color system is protected, graphic designers, dye manufacturers and others working in the world of color have been hampered. For example, in 2022, when Pantone’s contract with Adobe ended, a paywall for Pantone colors was introduced in Photoshop; If you weren’t willing to pay a monthly fee, the colors went black.

Still, according to Pantone, many other people are willing to pay.

“Because we live in this visual culture, more and more people want guidance,” Pressman said. “So much money depends on these decisions.”