The Pleasures of Pantone

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When the Pantone colour system was invented in 1962 and developed into the business it is today by Lawrence Herbert, the word ‘web’ was associated with ‘web offset’ printing; printing on a continuous roll of paper. The word ‘web’ now is more readily related to the Internet and there is a relationship between web design and Pantone.

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Pantone is a system of specifying colour according to a standard so that clients, designers and printers can share an agreed specification for a particular colour. When it comes to print, the designer can refer to a paper swatch and read off the Pantone number which is then supplied to the printer. In days before digital tools, designers could use crayons, marker pens, paper and coloured adhesive sheets, all created according to their Pantone number, to simulate the finished artwork. With digital technology, page layout and graphic applications all come with the pantone swatches. All computer screens are different though, so unless you 'calibrate' your monitor, you can't be sure that what you are looking at will look the same on paper. If your corporate brand specification includes some Pantone colours, how do you translate those to the web site? First we must ask ourselves the question: are we ready to move beyond web safe colours? There was a time when you should have used colours from the palette of 216 so that you could be sure your web design would render well on 8-bit display systems (256 colours). Nowadays we can presume that most of our viewers are using computers capable of displaying millions of colours, or can we? Actually statistics show that there certainly are more systems out there now with true colour displays but unfortunately many users may have their system set up in 256 colour mode. Moving Onwards Ok lets move on to presume that WE CAN use any colour from the millions available and worry not about the consequences.

See what Lynda Weinman says about this.

How do you display a colour on the screen that is specified as a Pantone number? There are tools on the market to provide you with an RGB or Hexadecimal value of a Pantone colour. So this is appropriate if you wish to setup an area of your browser (background, div, or table cell) to display in that colour. The tools I know are: PANTONE ColorWeb Pro 2.0 (http://www.pantone.com) Art Directors Toolkit 3 (http://www.code-line.com) Authographic have one online: http://www.authorgraphic.co.uk/pantone.htm Photoshop has a Pantone swatch built right in. Some of these methods seem to come up with a different HEX value: Here is an example: Pantone 158 c (coated) Art Directors toolkit #DE7008 Authographic web site #E87511 Photoshop swatch #E96B10 Click on the tiny graphic above to see this as a JPEG image. I don't have a copy of PANTONE ColorWeb Pro 2.0 but I presume that the licensed swatch in the Art Directors Toolkit is the same.

Posted on 19 Jul around 6pm

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