Fuchsia, nectarine or aquamarine are the names of the colors we deal with every day. The malicious could add that actually only the fair sex has to deal with them, since for the vast majority of men it will be simply pink, orange and "seawater". Regardless of such malice, such nomenclature seems intuitive and obvious to us. One would expect that the names that are present in everyday language will also penetrate the language of designers and will also be clear to web developers, printers or creative graphic designers. Meanwhile, a glance at the first better case study present in a creative portfolio will give us colors we didn't know existed....
Catch 'em all, or what can we run into?
Starting with the industries embedded on the Internet, the basic color notations will be the so-called hexadecimal notation (in the form of the "#" symbol and a six-character designation, for example #FF0001) and RGB. While the latter notation is fairly clear to us, especially after the abbreviation (Red, Green, Blue) is expanded, the former notation seems to be a complete abstraction. This is not surprising, since it is a "machine" notation - understandable to a computer. However, its ominous form does not necessarily make us dizzy. This is because it is the translation of RGB color into numeric form. We will describe the details of this process in one of the next articles, but to arouse your curiosity I will only mention that, in short, color hex is three pairs of characters, each pair of which corresponds to a value from 0 to 255 for each component of RGB.
The case is different in printing - there the hexadecimal notation is absent, and the color given in RGB appears amateurish - comparable to the first questions of a new intern in the department. For real designers use CMYK notation. I will also talk about exactly how CMYK differs from RGB in another article, for now I will just leave you with a rather obvious piece of information - CMYK has four components - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. But that's just the tip of the iceberg, as you'll also find mentions of Pantone, Madeira, HKS or RAL in the printer.
Why is this happening? Who needs it?
Let's start with the obvious - lavender, burgundy or beige although they sound beautiful and seem intuitive to us are hard to identify clearly. Out of a hundred people asked about the color beige, each will indicate a slightly different shade, and already color names such as Venetian pink, ochre or khaki seem to be the domain only of artists or fashion houses. So it's hard to imagine a situation in which a graphic designer gets an order to make a logo in a shade of delicate scarlet complemented by malachite. The one hearing such a combination would most likely propose a leave of absence on demand. That's why the so-called color systems, such as RGB, CMYK, HSL or Lab, have been introduced, which, by means of numerical values, define precisely the components of a given color, which eliminates the fear that the color will be presented differently than the customer would see it.
However, precision is not always simplicity. Color models are millions of combinations of individual components. Again, it's hard to imagine a situation in which a printer painstakingly prepares a color consisting of exactly 47.5% red, 21.5% green and 31% blue. This is why printing houses (excluding so-called digital printing methods) use color palettes - Pantone, Madeira, HKS or RAL.
Palette, versus color model
As I wrote earlier, the color model defines how a color is defined by determining the components of a given color and how and to what extent they are combined. For example: for RGB, each component can have a value of 0-255, while in CMYK it can be 0-100, HSL, on the other hand, is a system in which the first component can take a value of 0-360, and the other two 0-100.
The color palette does not tell us the components, but "only" presents clearly defined colors that we can use. This works identically to, for example, the Dulux color palette, where we can't freely mix different colors for ourselves, but only get a bound catalog of samples. This is where the buyer knows exactly what, say, chive green will look like. Graphic palettes really differ from this template in one detail - colors here, as a rule, are defined by numbers and symbols.
Who is Mr. Tone?
We already know that it is a color palette, or more precisely, the most popular color palette created by Pantone Inc®, which in its basic form contained more than 1,100 colors. However, this value has been successively increased. The scientific literature often also calls it the "color scale" or the "color identification system" from the original name "Pantone Matching System," from which, in turn, the alternative color term PMS was also borrowed. However, leaving aside academic quibbles, let's assume for simplicity that it is simply a Color Palette used in printing.
Why is it so popular? Probably because it was the first of its kind and such a successful attempt to create a uniform color standard-an easy-to-present, reliable system in which we clearly define the available colors and can easily verify them. But wait, after all, that's what we use RGB or CMYK for. Why don't we use them? Aside from the aforementioned problem of preparing paint with very strictly defined components, there is another important reason toward using a palette rather than a color model.
If you display a particular graphic on a dozen different devices you will get a dozen mildly different graphics. This has to do at least with the lighting in the room, the components of the monitor or display, the accuracy of color reproduction or the technical condition of the device. To these slight misrepresentations should be added a slightly larger problem - when we want to see a photo in CMYK, we really only see its "translation" - the vast majority of commercial monitors and displays operate only in RGB space. That is, "mechanically." Of course, we can set ourselves a different color model in a graphics program, but still de facto the screen builds an image from RGB components. To be sure that we see the CMYK color exactly as it should be, we should get an expensive, specialized CMYK monitor, which, being fully operational and after proper calibration, under the right light conditions would only give us a real view of a given CMYK color. There are, of course, more problems on the RGB - CMYK line, but this one is enough to know how hard it would be to "get along" on the appearance of a given color.
This is where color palettes enter the scene - first, they significantly reduce the number of resulting combinations so that instead of millions of slightly different colors, we get a smaller number of much easier to distinguish variants within the palette. The second advantage is the color templates - these show exactly the number of variants and color samples based on the original Pantone inks. Each template additionally, on the last "page" provides a special tester in the form of two strips of paint. The principle is simple - if the strips are identical we are in ideal conditions for checking colors on the template, which means that the color we see will be identical to the one on the print. How many unique colors are we talking about? Pantone, for example, provides several thousand colors separated between coated (glossy), uncoated (matte), metallic or neon colors.
Relatives and friends of the graphic designer
So, we already know why the Pantone template was created and why it is so popular and even indispensable in the work of a graphic designer. Where then do the other palettes come from? HKS, RAL or Madeira seem to be redundant and only complicate matters by increasing the number of potential possibilities. HKS and RAL are de facto "only" an alternative to Pantone offering a slightly different approach to color creation. Indeed, they are not very popular, dominating mainly in German printers. The case is different with Madeira. This palette is actually an industrial thread color standard. It is therefore used in the process of decorative embroidery, because it would be difficult to color the thread with a specific Pantone or CMYK value. Fortunately, unlike the situation with Pantone, Madeira itself extends a helping hand toward designers by offering an easily accessible tool for translating Pantone inks into Madeira threads.
