Marketing, Branding, Design and More

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of my free time hanging out with PMS 425 and PMS 200. Although these are their legal names, I prefer to call them ‘Smoky Bear’ and ‘Roses are Red’. They come from the Pantone family of color swatches and for those of you who are not familiar with Pantone swatches, playing with them is like playing with paint swatches – only funner!

But, what is Pantone, really? Well, Pantone Inc. is a company and is best known for their Pantone Matching System (PMS) which is a proprietary color space where each color is designated by a number. So, why is this important? Because, when colors are printed through a traditional CMYK process, there is no way to guarantee a color is going to print as you expected. For designers and marketers this could produce results that are undesirable. The PMS color matching system provides a benchmark and therefore puts control back into their hands. This makes for happier designers and happier clients.

In the branding world, color consistency is very important when establishing your brand identity. Companies such as Tiffany & Co. who has a lot of equity invested into their signature blue color, have carefully selected 1 out of 1,114 available Pantone colors to represent their brand and keep it consistent across different printed media.

Click here to learn more about Pantone….what PMS are you?