Why Are Pantone Colors Important?

Color matching and consistency.

How does a printer know the actual color of your logo? For example, when the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill won the national basketball championship in 2017, they ordered thousands of t-shirts to sell. How did the UNC feel confident that their screenprinter would make “Carolina Blue” shirts instead of some other slightly different shade of blue or – God-forbid – DUKE BLUE? This consistency is done through color matching systems.

One of the most famous and widely used color matching systems is the Pantone Matching System for colors. Sometimes referred to as “PMS Colors”. Developed in the 1950’s, this system is basically a collection of colors that are used as a reference for printers and graphic artists to rely upon when reproducing logos and other color critical graphics.

*“What is color matching and how does it relate to logos and branding?”*

The scope of products and uses of color matching systems is too complex and long to completely address in this discussion. (For more detailed info on the Pantone matching system, click on the links at the end of this article.) For the purposes of this discussion, we will stick to the bare essentials: What is color matching and how does it relate to logos and branding.

Whether you are just creating a logo for your business or you have an existing logo, you should be sure your brand’s colors are matched as closely as possible to a “standard”. Consistency is the basic tool of branding (for more information, read Daniel’s blog post on branding). This consistency extends to the exact colors that represent your brand. How do we do this? Reputable printers, ad agencies, and graphic designers usually have a Pantone guide that they can use to determine and assign a color that matches your brand’s colors.

For example, when developing a logo for a client, one of the first steps we take at Freedom Creative Solutions is to go to the Pantone book with our client and decide on the colors that the client and our graphic design team feel are a good representation of their brand. Or, when a client comes in that has an existing logo, we will ask our client to bring in the most accurate printed representation of their logo’s colors and we then us our book to find the closest match. Sometimes there is not a clear match and we can keep the client’s example to refer to much like a Pantone color chip. We keep files on our clients with these reference colors and ensure that whenever we design or print for our clients, we maintain their color consistently as close as possible.

“As close as possible” is important to point out. Much of today’s printing is done on digital presses and wide format printers which don’t allow exact color matching. However, having a printed example of the correct color as a reference, we can work to get the printed color as close as possible. Without this reference, we could be way off and really have no way to know other than our recollection of what the color looked like. Once you have seen the countless shades of color available in any color gamut, you quickly understand why a printed reference is vital.

Thanks and check out my blog about branding and logos for more info! Daniel (signature)

More resources: https://www.pantone.com/the-pantone-matching-system | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantone

Branding – The art & science of creating a business’s identity

What is Branding and how does it affect my business?
Branding is the art & science of creating a business’s identity or image.

How is brand identity created?
Almost everything a business does that the public can observe becomes part of a brand’s identity. This is true to aspects of your brand that are carefully managed such as your company name and logo, and include even unplanned events such as when United Airlines beat and dragged a paying customer off one of its jets. This event has now become part of the brand. But crisis management is a topic for another day. Let’s start at the beginning for this short discussion.

Branding starts from the selection of a name for a business. Would you buy a truck called “Fabergé”? Or a computer called “Turtle”. I’m guessing not. So, the name chosen for a business should be chosen based on many factors and some of these are:

What is the actual meaning of the name if it has one? This can be particularly vexing for international companies. Famously, in 1962 Chevrolet introduced a car called Chevy Nova. While Nova means a bright star in English, unfortunately for Chevrolet it means “No Go” in Spanish. The car did miserably in Mexico and other Spanish speaking countries. Who wants to buy a NOGO car!
How does the name sound and what does it rhyme with?
Is it easy to pronounce and spell?
Is it distinct and memorable?
Is the “feeling” that hearing it evokes synonymous with the business’s personality and mission?

After deciding on a name, the next focus should be on what that name looks like. In other words, the logo.

A logo sometimes has distinctive text/font used to write a company name. A font is how a character in a typeface is rendered (shape, thickness, style). The Ebay logo is a great example of using a distinctive font and color together to create a memorable & powerful logo:

A logo can be a symbol combined with a name. Sometimes the symbol is a separate element next to the name as in the Nike Swoosh logo.

Freedom Creative Solutions has created a unique symbol which is actually the letters FCS combined & connected into a circle. Further, the 4 base colors used in printing (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow & Black) are implemented to connect with design and printing.

The advantage with these types of logos is that over time, if the symbol is memorable, as in the Nike Swoosh or FCS logo referred to above, the symbol can be used like a stamp that can actually replace the full company name yet still evokes the same brand identity.

Fed Ex took this idea of a symbol and a name and combined it to create their very memorable and clever logo. Some people may not notice the forward facing arrow but it still evokes the feeling of moving forward whether it is immediately perceived or not:

Color & Branding:
As you can see from several of the above examples, color is key to creating a memorable & effective logo. Colors by themselves have meaning and evoke feelings.

Different cultures often ascribe different meanings to colors, so international products and services should be aware of the cultural significance of both their name and the colors used in their branding in the different countries they operate.

As an example, in the US we connect blue with calmness, white with clean, brown with dependable, orange, yellow, and red with hunger, energy, warnings/danger.

As you can see, fast food restaurants believe that orange and yellow evoke feelings of hunger.

Once the company name, logo & colors have been chosen/created, there should be an almost total devotion to consistency. While the shape of the logo (font and symbol) is easy to transmit to printers, designers, etc, the difficult part to consistently get right is the color. One printer’s version of fire engine red may look more like candy apple red or – worse yet – pink. Imagine how McDonalds would react if their billboards used the wrong red color. It wouldn’t be pretty…

So, the solution to this is the Pantone Color Matching System. Matching your color to Pantone Colors if vital to communicating your logo colors to the people that will be reproducing your logo on car wraps, printed materials, web sites, graphic designs, shirts and promotional materials.

Click here to learn more about the Pantone Color Matching System.

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