Pantone Gives Designers 175 New Ways to Celebrate Color
The Pantone LLC color standards and development division of Kentwood-based X-Rite Corp. (Nasdaq: XRIT) announced the addition of 175 new colors to its Pantone Fashion and Home Color System, bringing its total to 2,100 shades.
A behind-the-scenes view into the selection of these new colors for the Pantone Fashion and Home Color System can be seen at www.pantone.com/newcolors.
"There is a range of colors to suit every collection -- both nuanced and tonal colors as well as vibrant and fresh," said Peter Som, American women's wear designer. "At the end of the day, all of the colors are sophisticated and fit with whatever I'm inspired by."
"One would think it would be impossible for Pantone to best itself, but indeed it has," said Jonathan Adler, maker and designer. "I didn't imagine that there were 175 more colors in the world but Pantone managed to find them, number them and add them to its already legendary assortment -- an unbelievable feat and a boon to designers the world over."
As a comprehensive resource to the industry, hundreds of thousands of designers, manufacturers and retailers worldwide rely on the Pantone Fashion and Home Color System for color selection, accurate color communication and creative inspiration. Reflecting today's global color influences across fashion, home furnishings and interior design, the 175 new colors enrich the current palette and focus on areas of significant market importance and color trend movement.
"Designers continually discover new color inspiration and look to Pantone to help them reliably reproduce these colors in their designs," said Laurie Pressman, vice president of fashion, home and interiors at Pantone. "When evaluating how to expand the Pantone Fashion and Home Color System with more color options, it was essential to create a broad range of colors that were both trend-right and technically achievable for all of the markets we serve – from fashion and home furnishings to interior and industrial design."
The 175 new colors represent permanent additions to the Pantone Fashion and Home Color System. For a more comprehensive selection, all color families were expanded to include:
• A broader range of nuanced neutrals and mid-tones
• An increased number of vibrant brights
• Many complex hues with greater depth and intensity
• More subdued and smoky variations of popular colors
Arranged by color family, the 175 new colors can be purchased separately or combined with current Pantone Fashion and Home and Pantone Paints and Interiors publications. The new colors are also available individually in Pantone Smart Color Swatch Card format.
Every Pantone Fashion and Home new colors purchase includes Pantone Color Manager Software, a versatile application that provides the digital data for all new colors to update popular design applications including Adobe Creative Suite, QuarkXPress, CorelPainter, X-Rite i1 Profiler, the Mac OS Color Picker and myPantone.com.
Color Manager allows users to:
* View and export all Pantone Color Libraries including the complete Pantone Fashion and Home Color Library (Fashion and Home cotton, paper and recently announced nylon brights), as well as all Pantone Plus and Goe Libraries -- totaling more than 13,500 Pantone Colors
* Obtain CMYK, HTML and sRGB values for all colors
* Extract colors from images and photographs
* Build and export color palettes for use in popular design applications
* Preview colors under various lighting simulations to visualize the effect different lighting conditions have on color appearance
* Create color-managed palettes using industry-standard ICC display and output profiles
* Identify colors that cannot be accurately reproduced in print or on screen with out-of-gamut warning alert.
* Sync with Pantone Capsure and export measured colors to use in palette development
The Pantone Fashion and Home new colors library will also be accessible within Pantone Capsure, the compact, handheld device that lets design professionals, contractors, paint retailers and do-it-yourselfers confidently measure and match color inspiration instantly from any surface. Current Capsure users will be prompted to download the 175 new colors through Capsure Sync later this summer.
Pantone is the only globally available, off-the-shelf color system that designers and their vendors can trust for unsurpassed color accuracy. The Pantone Fashion and Home Smart Color System helps meet speed-to-market needs, lower color management costs and provide higher color quality at point of sale – requirements necessary in today's global market.
Pantone Fashion and Home Color System new color products will ship in June and are available immediately for pre-order at www.pantone.com/newcolors and Pantone resellers worldwide. New colors can be purchased separately or combined with current Pantone Fashion and Home product offerings. Prices range of the various projects range from $50 to $4,500.
More at www.pantone.com or www.xrite.com.
