What is a Pantone Color? Pantone colors seem like a miracle for designers when they
first start designing for print.
It is a color selection system that should print exactly the color that
they see in their swatch books. Designing everything using Pantone inks may not
be the best idea. What most designers have never been told is that the Pantone
Color matching system is great if your customer wants to pay for the specific
Pantone inks to be ordered from Pantone and used in the press in place of the
traditional Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and black inks that make up standard full
color press printing. Once you
design something that contains more than 2 pantone inks, the price is
considerably higher than standard 4-color printing (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and
Black ink) due to the cost of ordering the specific Pantone Inks. The combination of Cyan, Magenta,
Yellow and Black inks can create just about any color that you are looking for…
with some major exceptions. The
problems arise when designers go overboard picking multiple pantone colors for
their designs. For example I
recently had a customer send us a postcard from a design agency in which the
agency had chosen 5 different Pantone or PMS colors as the “brand” colors. This seems like the right thing to do to
ensure the color will not vary from one printed piece to another, but one of those colors was Pantone Orange
21. If you view Pantone Orange 21
on your monitor and in a Pantone Swatch book it is a very bright orange. It was what seemed to be a very nice color
choice. However since we had priced the postcard as our standard full color
printing, CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black ink) printing, we had to
convert the PMS Orange 021 in the design into the following color breakdown: 0%
Cyan ink, 68% Magenta ink, 100% yellow ink, and 0% Black ink. This color breakdown, which is the
recommended color breakdown by Pantone, creates a much different orange color.
Why? Since Pantone creates the Pantone Orange 021 ink using unique pigments
that are completely different from Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black, the final
color is a color that can not be achieved using mixes of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow
and Black ink. The best we can do
is to attempt to get it as close as possible. Here is an image with Pantone 021 ink next to the suggested
CMYK combination to show you the difference.
What you are viewing is not a correct and absolute
representation of the inks since you are viewing these colors on a monitor that
combines Red, Green and Blue to create the colors you see.
Although the difference may not seem like much to you on
your monitor, the difference can mean a lot to your customer.
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