Did you know the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM® is 45 years old? I didn’t. Back then, the design and publishing industries were vastly different from what they are today—computers weren’t even available to the general public, let alone on each of our desktops as they are today. And yet, we are still throwing ink on rubber blankets with oil and water in order to get the ink on the paper. Ours is an industry where old and new technologies converge. So I am understandably excited that Pantone has announced today a new coloring system, the PANTONE Goe™, that seeks to update our use of color in design and printing.

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The PANTONE Goe System’s packaging—very slick, designed for designers. Click to enlarge.

Hard Facts For Designers

Goe will not replace the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM, or PMS. While I would expect Goe to at least affect the way PMS is used in the future, Pantone says PMS will not disappear as a result of Goe. “The original PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM was designed to meet the needs of an industry that was functioning without a precise and reliable way to communicate color,” said Richard Herbert, president of Pantone, Inc. “The PANTONE Goe System works in concert with the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM to empower everyone in the creative and production process with a simpler, more complete, user-friendly workflow from the moment of inspiration to the realization of a finished product.”

Goe has more colors. PMS offers 1,114 colors; Goe offers 2,058 new colors. Not only are there more colors, but the palette has been expanded to meet designers’ needs: green, for example, is a hot color so now there’s plenty more greens to choose from. Designers are always looking for the perfect color to complement their creations, and Goe’s expanded palette should ensure the perfect color exists outside of process color.

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The Goe swatchbook is organized very differently than the standard PANTONE FORMULA GUIDE. Click to enlarge.

The Goe swatchbook (dubbed the “GoeGuide™” by Pantone) is arranged chromatically. As you can see in the image above, the Goe system is organized so it is far easier to find colors. A big component of this new organizational system is a chromatic arrangement of the colors in swatchbooks.

Goe colors’ numbers mean something. Do you know why “280″ means a blue in PMS terms? I don’t know why. But Goe’s numbering system is designed so the numbers do give a clue as to what a color might be. Again, I will explain this in detail.

GoeGuides tell you how to convert its colors to RGB—not CMYK. Goe System colors are all easily converted to RGB: the numbers are right in the GoeGuide, as always. You won’t find CMYK equivalents, however. Pantone knows that the design world is now interdisciplinary, encompasses a variety of media (some of which are not printed with process color), worldwide and more sophisticated than ever. As a result, Goe is moving forward with the RGB model of color.

Hard Facts For Printers And Press Operators

Goe offers more colors but less mixing bases. The PMS uses 14 basic colors as mixing bases, plus PANTONE Clear, with which it gets the other 1,100 colors in its system. Printers wanted to get more colors but with less mixing bases, so Goe reduces the number of mixing bases to 10 (plus PANTONE Clear). This is a big bonus for printers because less inks are required in inventory and it’s easier to obtain these mixing bases worldwide, ensuring that color will be uniform across the world. The mixing bases are also designed to create consistent color with a variety of aqueous and UV coating and papers, and to print with uniform thickness so drying times are reduced and it’s easier to match colors on press.

Here are the Goe mixing bases:

• PANTONE Medium Yellow
• PANTONE Medium Purple
• PANTONE Bright Orange
• PANTONE Dark Blue
• PANTONE Bright Red
• PANTONE Medium Blue
• PANTONE Strong Red
• PANTONE Bright Green
• PANTONE Pink
• PANTONE Neutral Black
• PANTONE Clear

The Goe System was created under strict ISO guidelines. Pantone used new, specially engineered presses and an ISO quality management infrastructure (ISO 9001:2000) to produce the Goe System, which means it’s as standards-based as you can get. Its swatchbooks, including its GoeGuides and related products, are produced in the same production environment.

GoeGuides are printed on the closest thing to “standard” paper. The GoeGuide is printed on #1 grade 100 lb coated offset text, which their research indicates is the most common premium paper used today for commercial offset lithography and digital printing.

About The GoeGuide

The PANTONE Goe System marks a sea change in how Pantone organizes its swatchbook colors. The PANTONE® FORMULA GUIDE (the PMS swatchbook) is organized by a centerline color, which is the color in the center of every page. These colors are either PMS mixing bases or combinations of bases. The colors above it are tints created by adding PANTONE Clear; the colors below are shades created by adding black. These colors are then numbered sequentially. The downsides to this method is that the numbers don’t necessarily tell you which color you are referring to and the palette is not organized like a spectrum or color wheel.

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A single PANTONE FORMULA GUIDE PAGE at left, with five GoeGuide pages at right. Comparing the two will help you understand the Goe concept. Click to enlarge.

The Goe System palette is organized with “full strength colors,” or colors created with one or two Goe mixing bases. This allows the highest chroma values for each color. Full strength colors occupy the bottom color bar of a page and colors above it are given increasing amounts of PANTONE Clear. However, if one page has a full strength color at the bottom then the next page has that same color plus some black, thus creating a shade. That page then adds PANTONE Clear to create the other colors above it. If a full-strength color can have up to seven levels of PANTONE Clear and up to five levels of black added to it, then that color has 35 different Goe colors associated with it across a series of pages.

Full strength colors are organized from series to series in chromatic order so the entire GoeGuide looks like a color wheel when spread out. Because of this new organization, it becomes much easier to use the GoeGuide and the Goe System in general. I personally use my PANTONE FORMULA GUIDE only rarely because I do not like hunting for colors with it. The GoeGuide is organized the way the PANTONE FORMULA GUIDE should be organized.

Numbering The Goe Colors: As Easy As 5, 4, 1

What color is PANTONE 145? How about PANTONE 7469? I couldn’t tell you without picking up a swatchbook or launching Photoshop. The PANTONE Goe System tries to clear things up with a new numbering system. Here’s how it works:

PANTONE (C)-(B)-(W) (P)

C = Full strength color (numbered from 1 to 165)
B = Amount of black (1 = no black, maximum of 5)
W = Amount of white (7 = no white, maximum of 1)
P = Paper type (usually “C” for coated)

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The GoeGuide entry for PANTONE 4-1-4 C. Click to enlarge.

In the example above, PANTONE 4-1-4 C is a yellow with no black and some PANTONE Clear.

As far as I can tell, the numbers don’t actually say how much of the black or white mixing bases are added to the color. It’s only there to describe where on the scale each color resides. It’s kind of a confusing combination: black increases as its number increases, but white actually decreases as its number increases. Moreover, it’s up to you to know the full strength color numbers. The scale begins at yellow (0) and sweeps around to brown-black (165). 70, for example is a blue. I wouldn’t expect designers or printers to memorize these numbers—more likely, designers will only need to have an idea of what a full strength color might be, and printers will refer to a booklet to know exactly what mixing bases are required.

Can Pantone Successfully Market Both?

I am excited about Goe, because Pantone is doing the right thing in revising an old standard and they are doing it well. Goe has more colors, more consistency, better organization, a better numbering structure, and more new products to support it (look for Samuel Klein’s article about myPANTONE, PANTONE GoeSticks™ and other Goe-related toys for designers, or see below). I would expect the Goe System to be the de facto standard in ten years.

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Here you can see the GoeGuide, GoeSticks and the myPANTONE software on CD. Click to enlarge.

However, there’s already a standard—the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM. So do designers and printers need the Goe System if they already have a standard color system that’s been around for almost fifty years? There’s rarely room for more than one dominant product in any industry, and when there is it’s not long before one loses its market share and fades away (Freehand is a prime example). The Goe System has most of the PMS colors in its structure already, so there’s a case to be made for eliminating the PMS and adopting Goe—but Pantone is not advocating that, at least not yet. It’s an interesting debate, and I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when Pantone’s decision-makers were discussing what would eventually become the Goe System.

I think that, in the end, one system will have to supplant the other as “the standard.” It makes sense for the Goe System to be that new standard, but for the time being don’t expect Pantone to press that notion. I wouldn’t expect designers and printers to change quickly either, but that remains to be seen.