I want to show you this book. This is one of the first, if not the first,
Pantone color matching books. It contains color chips that helped designers in 1963
match colors.
And I got it because I was curious, due to the endless press, and the color-based merch,
and the — I kid you not — half-hour long color of the year reveal video:
“Color can change the world.” “Pantone.”
“Pantone.” “Pantone is really the authority.”
How did this happen? How did one company, Pantone, become so associated with color?
And maybe more importantly, how could any company own a color? How could they own something
that seems like it should be free? And are they gonna lose it?
So I really wanted to know how Pantone could own a color. I even called my design friend
Linus for backup. How should I describe you to the audience?
Font God? YouTube God? “Font God is, that's my rap name is Font
God. Uh, you could call me a graphic designer turned YouTube font guy, I guess, but I talk
about logos and fonts on YouTube and try to make it interesting to normal people.”
I think the tricky thing with Pantone is that we associate all this cultural color stuff
with it, and also a lot of people have primarily digital color vocabularies.
But here's the thing about Pantone. It all comes down to the print.
“It's a whole strange thing because it kind of fits together with the whole broader story
of like the death of print.”
Before you get to all the Pantone branded merch, you have to understand this book. And
I want you to be able to see it.
Pantone's big breakthrough is all about these color chips. Basically, if you're a designer,
you could take a color chip and printers and manufacturers around the world would know
the exact color to give you. Matching colors exactly is harder than it sounds. I'll be
right back.
I didn't actually buy this. I just never throw away my trash.
Okay, so Starbucks logo right here. It has to be this green, right? Doing anything else
is brand suicide if it turns into this green. It's just not right. You'd wonder who was
making your Starbucks if you're in danger. Enter Pantone. The printer looks up the swatch
and has a secret formula made from a small number of base colors.
The printer mixes it together and —I made up the proportions here — and boom, you
get the same starbucks in Alabama and Albania. (Buzzer, followed by dinging bell)
And let's be clear, that is what Pantone owns today: the combination of the color with the
system, not the color itself. Here's a very old example I found on eBay. See how each
color is made of proportions of more basic inks? Everybody around the country and later
the world can get the same recipe for this method of printing bright ink.
This method is called spot color.
And that is the value that these swatches represent. Everyone around the world can have
access to the same special recipe. But how did Pantone get in this essential position?
How did they start to own color?
This is a digital copy of DuPont direct colors on cotton, a matchbook for consistent color
dyes.
So it's not like people weren't thinking about color long before Pantone.
Here's a textile book from the Textile Association of the United States.
Ruby, Bluebird, Tea Rose.
People knew they needed color standards and there was also color science work like this
color science manual or these national standards for color names.
I love the idea of bureaucrats thinking up Strawberry Pink and Sweet William.
There's also color science, but remember, despite their branding today, color is not
really the Pantone superpower. What they own is the system and that secret ink recipe—
the swatches.
This is the king of color. I think it's fair to say it's a corporate hagiography of Pantone
chieftain, Larry Herbert, uh, written by him and his co-author.
Basically, they explain a bit about the early Pantone story, and while it does feed a lot
of corporate interests, it also gives you a bit of insight as to why everybody was so
willing to get on the Pantone bandwagon.
Our hero, Larry Herbert, took over Pantone, sort of like Elon Musk took over Tesla. It
existed before him, but it really changed with the new owner coming in. Herbert had
a real sense of print manufacturers’ complaints at the time. Every printer had to print their
own swatches and invent their own color recipes for customers.
There were also tens of thousands of printers across the United States with no total dominating
player. “It’s kind of mind boggling to think about
how many people had jobs in printing as an industry.” Yeah.
“At some point, and now it's just kind of dwindled into this like shadow of its form
of self.”
So industry associations weren't a great option because the power was fragmented.
“For such a relatively small industry now compared to what it used to be it's still
very fragmented and Pantone is kind of an exception.”
This situation was also bad for people printing stuff, the designers.
You can see the pain points in brand guides from the time.
Seven-Up had their brand game together really early, but they had to specify paint brands
that might have been hard to find nationally. It was similar for British Rail.
For the Montreal Expo, they just had to print a bunch of swatches.
Pantone matching system debuted in 1963, and it was a eureka moment. Look how everything
changed after the debut of PMS. I don't make up the acronyms, I just work
here. Paul Rand's, iconic IBM Manual had a swatch
and Pantone values. The 74 Expo brand guide, it used Pantone colors.
By 1981, New Jersey Transit had it. In 94, the Army Corps of Engineers used it, and in
1993, the Apple apple was six Pantone colors. Pantone spread internationally for this reason
as well. In some countries like Japan, the market was less fragmented, so it was harder
for Pantone to win. There, DIC corporation dominated.
I don't make up the acronyms. And today the RAL standard is powerful in
Europe. Even the US government has had its own standard,
but by muscling its way from market, to market, to market, Pantone was able to start owning
color.
So I have a confession to make. Originally I was gonna frame all of these. But then I
got scared that Pantone might sue me.
I think that's actually a fitting way to close this out. Most directly, they immediately
started suing anybody who tried to copy their formula or paint values, like this lawsuit
of Pantone versus Paratone. Basically, Paratone was trying to piggyback off Pantone codes,
but they were stopped. Less directly, their hold on spot color made
it easy to expand to realms where their innovation was actually less important. But the system
still held. “There was a time when spot color was king,
but that time kind of came to an end. Definitely by the 2000s the, the era of the spot color,
um, kind of had dwindled.” So like, would even like a McDonald's fry
box red or a Starbucks cup green, would that even be not necessarily printed with spot
color anymore? “Those would probably still be, yeah, if
you are, if you are printing 200,000 Starbucks mugs, then it makes sense to use spot color.”
Okay. Gotcha. “Um, but if they're doing, like some football
team won in their local area and they wanna do like a regional promotional drink and they're
gonna do 20,000 of those flyers, that's not gonna be in spot color.
Your home printer probably uses CMYK. It's just a combination of cyan, magenta, yellow,
and black. It's not quite as good as spot color, but it's not bad. But because Pantone
has that special spot color formula, it's CMYK value is worth working with for cross-compatibility.
The same thing for Pantone's digital extensions into RGG —this — and hex — this.
The point is that most consumers don't care about spot color, but Pantone's beachhead
in that realm means that their colors are relevant to all of us.
“Part of why Pantone became more part of the public consciousness is that they moved
away from the core product to the cultural cachet of their IP rather than the actual
literal use of their core products.”
That is why their fight with Adobe matters. For a while, Adobe licensed Pantone then balked
at paying for it. So they hid all these Pantone labeled colors. They just turned them into
black. Now, designers have to pay for a Pantone plugin or a free alternative, but it's not
the colors that Pantone owns.
It's the formula and the system. Pantone will tell you about how they use color science
know-how or how they use swatch orders to forecast the color of the year. Pantone even
has a corporate relationship with Munsell, a storied color system that can help you decipher
the colors of soil or a french fry.
But I think that's all extra on top of the real reason that Pantone won. And I think
it's fascinating that even in an age of so much digital color, we still connect with
the value of ink printed on a page the right way. And that might be why this book is worth
saving.
That is it for this one. Thank you for watching. If you haven't been here before, this is a
personal channel where I post personal videos, history videos, stuff like that. Uh, big thanks
to Linus for coming on. He's one of my first like YouTube friends via this channel, and
his channel is so good. He has design criticism, font stuff.
Um, I don't know if I have a favorite video per se because they're just all good. They're
all so deep in their research and they're all really funny. If you've seen this one
about Papyrus, I know that was a, that was a big hit 'cause it actually gets into the
history of that. Please check him out. He's awesome.
Otherwise, thank you so much for watching. Thank you for being a part of this. Um, there's
a reaction video to this one up on Patreon. That's something I do over there. Also I give
you kind of behind the scenes tours and info like that. So if that's something that interests
you, um, maybe check it out and hopefully there's credits too, I think I added those,
right?
Um, yeah. So thank you for watching and otherwise I will see you in the next one.