Pantone isn't the only color system of its kind. But thanks to an innovative founder and savvy marketing, it's become the industry standard.Each year, since the turn of the millennium, word arrives from on high: Pantone, the self-described world's authority on color, announces its Color of the Year.
In response to the annual color pick, designers in fashion and interiors, marketers and creators incorporate the pigment into their products to stay on trend. As part of the campaign, brands partner with Pantone, making the company money from owning a color.But Pantone is not the only company to develop a standardized set of colors, nor the first to put names to colors.
"He understood, if this is an issue going on in print, this is an issue that goes through many other different industries," Pressman said. Some of its famous trademarked colors belong to big brands. Both Target's bold red and Tiffany & Co.'s robin egg blue belong to the Pantone color family.Before Pantone turned its color standard into a big business, some of the first modern color systems came from naturalists trying to identify and differentiate bird species or flowers in reference works known as color dictionaries.
Ridgway's color dictionary, with over 1,000 colors, included hues that referenced birds, like"Jay Blue," while others derived from fruits —"Apple Green" — or the natural environment, as in"Storm Gray."His color book"evolved into the Pantone color chart," according to Lewis."Ridgway's Colors" are still used today by mycologists, philatelists and food colorists, according to Lewis' 2012 book.