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Tip: What is the Pantone scale for?

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Tip: What is the Pantone scale for?


In traditional printing four process colours are used and the four letters,
CMYK may look familiar to you. C is for cyan, M is for magenta, Y is for yellow
and K is for key black. During the printing process, these four colours are
applied onto the cardboard one after the other in the form of small dots
(screen). Under a magnifying glass (or a lupe in printing) the final image
looks like a pointillist painting, but by the naked eye they cannot be seen if
the quality of the product is good enough. 
Using the four processes in printing, we can reproduce most colours perfectly
or almost perfectly match the original ones. There are, however, some special
colours for which the ink has to be produced at an ink factory so that the
print will be of the same colour as the one in the sample. Most brand colours
are like that as well as metallic and neon colours, which collectively are also
called solid or spot colours. The common language for these is provided by
standard colour systems for material colours (and not physical ones). One of
such systems is for example Pantone or PMS that is Pantone Matching System.
The Pantone Formula Guide, which has continuously been expanded and improved
since its introduction 40 years ago, is one of the most commonly used colour
communication tools in the printing industry. 
 
Pantone issued its so called Pantone Color Bridge guide in March 2005. It has
several advantages compared to the previous one, for instance next to the major
colour samples, they included the RGB (1)and HTML (2) data as well, which are
of great help to webpage designers. 
Further information: info@m-real.hu 
1) RGB: (red, green, blue) additive process colors which are also used for
example in computer screens. 
2) HTML: (Hyper Text Markup Language) a language of information technology
which enables us to create documents with a logically organized and structured
format on the web.

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