The Pantone Matching System: Always Show Your True Colours

The accuracy of colour is critical in design. Because what you see on your monitor is never what will appear on a printed sheet, designers need a standardized colour key.

PANTONE swatch books

It can be very frustrating to see the logo you worked hard to create look deep blue on the client’s letterhead, blue-greenish on his business card, and light blue on his very expensive envelopes.

A way to prevent this, is by using a standardized colour matching system, such as the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM. Though PANTONE is not the only colour standardization system, it is the most widely used and the one that most printers understand. Aside from being able to have consistency, PANTONE Colours allow you to use colours that cannot be mixed in CMYK.

Different Matches for Different Colour Lovers

Pantone creates matching systems for more than graphic designers. For the purposes of this article, however, we’ll focus on those systems typical of print designs.

Pantone offers chip books that help designers see how colours look on coated, uncoated, and matte stock. PANTONE Colours are distinguished by numbers and a suffix. While the number indicates the PANTONE Colour itself, and is standard across all types of stock, the suffix indicates the media or stock, which affects how how the ink is formulated to achieve the specific colour.

Guides Through a Colourful World

There are several types of swatch guides that catalog the colours of the PANTONE Library. Some are narrow swatch books made of strips bound one end with printed rectangular samples showing the different PANTONE Colours. The strips can then be opened or spread out in a fan-like manner. There are also binders with chips (rectangular swatches) that can be torn out and sent to a client with a proof, so that the client knows how his colours will look when printed.

Some of the PANTONE Colours can be reproduced by mixing CMYK inks while others must be pre-mixed inks. Pantone has guides for their spot colours (called “Solid” or pre-mixed ink colours by Pantone) and guides which show the Process colours. Samples in the Process guides are therefore colours achievable through mixing CMYK (or “process”) inks. A special guide also shows you the spot color and how it will look printed in CMYK along with CMYK values. This way, if spot colors, which are an added expense at print time, cannot be used, close colours may be mixed in process.

Same Colour, Different Looks

The type of paper used, will affect the appearance of colors. In separate swatch or chip books, Pantone shows you how their colors look on coated, uncoated, and matte paper. Therefore you have the number of the colour (for example, PANTONE Red 032) followed by a suffix which indicates on what stock your PANTONE Colour is meant to be printed. If you want PANTONE Red 032 on shiny paper, then you would specify the colour in this manner: PANTONE 032 C, where C stands for “coated”. You then have U, which stands for “uncoated”, and then M, which stands for “matte”. You get:

Solid, Pastel and Metallic formula guides (enlarged version)

C = coated
U = uncoated
M = matte

These three are the most important PANTONE Library abbreviations. You may, however, encounter the abbreviation CV followed by C, U or M. CV stands for Computer Video, which is the electronic representation of the PANTONE Colours. Now discontinued, but still seen in old versions of software, CV merely meant that the color was an on-screen simulation.

There are also specialty guides for tints, metallic and pastel colours.

One note of warning: If you use a colour with a certain suffix, don’t use it again with another suffix in the same publication, unless there is an actual need for that, such as when you use a colour on a 4-colour glossy magazine with an insert printed on bond paper. In this case you would be using the same colour both on coated and matte paper. If you use two different suffixes in the same publication, your desktop publishing software will see the colour as two different colours and this will cause the production of one extra plate, and therefore the expense of extra money. So, use them only when necessary.

Digital Colour Guides for Your DTP Applications

Most modern creative applications ship with all the relevant PANTONE Libraries pre-installed. Adobe Illustrator, for example, includes complete Coated, Uncoated, Matte, Metallic, Fluorescent, and Pastel colours, among others. If your application doesn’t have recent versions of the libraries, however, you may download them free from Pantone. Pantone offers downloads for Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, QuarkXPress, Macromedia Freehand, Corel Draw and Corel Designer. Even if you don’t have those programs, the generic EPS and TIFF file versions may be used to import the PANTONE Colour swatches into most other applications. You can download the files here.