What Is the Pantone Color Wheel?Īctually, it’s pretty straightforward. In other words, Pantone is every-pinking-where. According to the company’s website, “Each year, innumerable products and services are sold by Pantone and its hundreds of licensees in over 100 countries in the graphic arts, fashion, home, interior, plastics, architectural, paint, industrial design and consumer markets.” Those products and services include printing and packaging, plastics, R&D, and much more. In addition to these color-system related efforts, Pantone has its hands in myriad business ventures. The company is also famous these days for its Color Institute, which has been responsible for, among other things, heavily promoting the existence of Millennial Pink, and for announcing the Color of the Year (2018’s is Ultra Violet, ICYMI). Herbert’s big breakthrough was streamlining exactly how colors are created what precise mix of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (yup, your old printer ink colors!) will give you, say, pine green or fire-engine red. Pantone colors are used as the industry standard so that variations in light, fabric, and eyesight don’t get in the way of precision.
Pantone is a company founded in 1963 by Laurence Herbert, who, according to People, “created a system for identifying, matching and communicating colors for consistency across the print and textile design industries.”įrom there, the magazine reports, the company expanded to include tools that kept Herbert’s initial goals moving forward. In fact, that’s why we’re all here today - to figure out what the hell the Pantone Color Wheel is, and how it relates to your business. If you’re asking that, friend, you’re not alone.
Maybe you don’t worry much about the official color of the year. Why? Well, we’re guessing that it’s because you’ve got a morbid curiosity about what the Pantone Color Wheel has to do with anything relevant to your life. So, you clicked on a story about the Pantone Color Wheel.