Thanks for the collab, Phil! Loved how clear and sharp this explainer came out. Proud to be part of it!

I know a guy who works at a print shop. His “party trick” (lol) is amazing - he’ll ask you to point at any object in the room, then immediately name the Pantone color code. When (inevitably) you don’t believe it, he pulls out a complete Pantone swatch book and, lo and behold, he’s nailed it. Incredible and bizarre to see in action!

I found the feud between Pantone and Adobe kind of funny because it's two companies that revolutionized graphic design in their early years and then shifted their attention to protecting their monopolies. (Meanwhile I'm over here using the Affinity suite with no regrets.)

I feel like you missed an opportunity to talk about what Pantone does besides printing. Pantone has color matching systems in other industries too. Things like Plastics, both glossy and matts, as well as fabrics. Matching these with digital coloring is huge.

Germany has RAL as standard. Everything from car paint, military camouflage, trademark colours and parliament seat covers are defined by it. It is owned by a nonprofit and it's not as exhaustive like Pantone, but at least it's accessible and not locked behind closed gates.

My career has been in printing and packaging, so I've definitely referenced Pantone books over the years. The other hook they have is that inks fade over time. You have to keep buying the books over and over. That retro book is cool but "useless" for matching color. (That never stopped customers from using old books in bad light, of course.) Really enjoyed the video!

These kind of colour standards would be so useful in my hobby - scale model cars. Most brands of model kit have their own paint tones and they are subtly different. If you want to match to a real life example of a formula 1 car from the 1960s, exact matches aren't always available.

You never fail to showcase something so random it actual shocks me ever time your videos drop. Keep it up.

Something that's worth mentioning is that as a designer you have to replace you colour blocks regularly. Pantone mentions on their website the duration for these colours a valid. With time aka UV degradation the chip no longer remain accurate. They also sell a special light box to view their colour chips in.

To me the advantage of pantone now is the consistency across medium. Not only print, but also paint, textiles, basically anything you can make with a color. Not to mention different mediums within those. Like you need a different formula for an ABS plastic part in PMS 197 vs a Nylon plastic part, and both those would be vastly different than what's needed to paint a wood part the same color. Pantone may have run its course in print, and I'm not jazzed about its lifestyle stuff, but it is invaluable when working with production process that require multiple materials and processes that end up with a final part in the same color. Like Starbucks not only needs to print their logo on cups and flyers, they also make metal cups and translucent plastic straws in that same green, which is a lot easier when you can go to the manufacturer and give them a pantone swatch of the color they need to match.

Not one, but several. In Europe, the German RAL space is popular. If you order a bus, you provide a description like "top RAL 1650, bottom RAL 3420”

I bought this book by a company that sells their paint. Although not 1 on 1, it will list the different color paints you must mix together to get the color it's showcasing. As an amateur acrylic painter as a hobby, using this book to "guess" a baseline for paint color, then experimenting until you get the exact color you want, finally writing down the proportions so it's replicatable, is invaluable to me. I always wondered how to take a Pantone color swatch and pick out a given set of paints to mix in the correct proportions to get the "exact" same color.

Also sort of mentioned in the video - using the Pantone swatches to match by eye. I worked at a home company that would make swatches for the season. Choosing certain colors based on inspiration photos to make all of their products for that season. So Winter's white might be bluer than summer's white. Then when things would get designed, a TCX (Pantone's fabric code) or C (Coated code) would be called out, and then the manufacturer would match to that color. They didn't have any formula to make that color. It was all trial and error. They were literally matching, with their eye, the finished product to the swatch. Then samples would be sent back to our office where color experts would analyze the color against the swatch and make complicated color notes to send back to the manufacturer.

I'll go that one better. Pantone has made their color system a subscription service, so you have to keep updating if you're going to keep up with the rest of the world.

This is a great video. However, it's important to explain just how complicated color is. I'm partially colorblind, and have studied color significantly. "Technology Connections" on KZfaq has some great videos on the subject. But the short version it's that it's important to understand the difference between additive color (IE, light coming from a screen) and subtractive color (IE, the light that bounces off inks and pigments) - and even more importantly, the interplay between the two. For example, light can look "white" with certain combinations of pure red, green, and blue - but because there are no hues present, only pure colors, when the light hits a painted object, the colors will look "off", as the pigments were chosen with the expectation that it'd be reflecting full-spectrum white light. This effect exists for people with normal color vision, but it becomes much more significant when you're partially colorblind like I am. Forget accurate representation of colors - but even something like ensuring there is a visible contrast between two colors (to understand a graph or map) can become incredibly complicated when you combine these factors. Anyway great video, and I've also been a long time subscriber to Linus, and it's nice to see him here!

It would be funny if Pantone could remove their colors from your eyesight unless you pay for them, so everyone would be partially color blind.

I don't get it. What do they own, the act of mixing colors? That's proportions, basic math. You can't own math.

It's the LEGO story again: not the original (there was a British company making linking plastic blocks) , but they [LEGO] improved and crucially developed a system! It's the "system" that counts in the end.

My previous employer had their own standard Pantone color. Anywhere in the world, if you just asked for Company Color you would get the EXACT same shade of color. As far as I know, this was only ever used for print. If I wanted to print a pamphlet for a customer, I just needed to find a printer that would support Pantone (basically all of them everywhere) and then tell them to use Company Color (or give the specific Pantone code for that color). It was pretty awesome. The best part to me was that Pantone provided an RGB hex value too! It was basically the hex value that most resembled our Pantone color when printed on white stock paper. It was actually extremely useful, and Pantone kind of deserves the spot they have. There was another color system we had a color with too but I forget what it was

"Please Don't Sue Me Yellow" is my favorite yellow

Adobe not wanting to pay to use Pantone in their software (and making people pay for a plug in to use it) is as ironic on rain on your wedding day...

All I need to know is if it's Pantone or Adobe who is responsible for Pantone Solid Coated no longer being a pre-loaded swatch book in the Adobe Creative Cloud. Very not cool.

I'm happy that the copy of Photoshop I use still has Pantone without the subscription lol.

I loved the animation style choices (not to mention the Lounge music). The source material was a fun look back at mid 20th century print art. I also liked hearing about the projections of this company; helps me understand some of the opportunities in their unique data set 😊 Thx Phil

I got very annoyed at much of the commentary around Adobe charging extra for Pantone support. A lot of people were complaining that Pantone is just a ridiculous idea, and it's somehow immoral for a company to claim they "own colours" (which, of course, they don't). It was a clear-cut case of Adobe just being greedy and refusing to take any expense onto themselves when they could outsource it to the consumer. Want Pantone support? Sure, but you have to pay for it. Meanwhile, Affinity products still include fully-licensed Pantone support in software that you pay for once and own forever, instead of being enslaved to a ludicrously expensive subscription service. All of this happened while we watched. I am old enough to remember Adobe buying almost all of their competitors, rolling some into the Adobe ecosyatem and just burying others in a way that honestly would have been found unlawfully anticompetitive in a functional legal system. Way back in the 90s I can remember feeling worried about what Adobe would do when they completely owned the digital design space and no longer had to compete, and their shift to an overpriced subscription model in the 00's was pretty much my worst case scenario. I know the Affinity Suite still lacks many of the functions of their Adobe equivalents - I mean, nobody is arguing that Adobe makes bad products, just that they created an environment where they could raise their prices almost indefinitely and professionals would still be forced to pay for their products - but Affinity Photo, Design, and Publisher do what I need 99% of the time for a tiny fraction of the price. I also feel good about not having to buy into a subscription model that I consider to be immoral and greedy that prices many creative people out of the market completely. Anyway, rant over. :)

As always another great video! I knew a little about Pantone, but your video made me realize how little it was. 1. Your videos, for me, are a cliff dive into a pool of knowledge. It's a deep dive with a climb back up for air, and a massive rush . I always end up doing a little self-guided learning after you present a topic. You truly are a gifted educator 2. I enjoy how you are experimenting with the shots of you in various settings with various backgrounds. I feel like just as i might be a bit familiar with your backdrops, you change it up. It's a nice way to keep changing things without a massive format change in video 3. The pairing of Your Videos and CBS Sunday Morning is such a great start to the week! 4. Now Subscribed to Linus! Thanks for the intro! DM'd you on Bird site, hope to see you on BlueSky at some point!

Me unknowingly choosing pantone paint in the past: ah...so that explains the price

My dad was a pressman from the 50s in Cuba retiring here in the 90s. I still have his Pantone book for mixing ink. He was a master at it and I loved watching him do it. This is such a tiny industry now. Time marches on!

It's so fascinating that DIC got mentioned here because I only recently saw a 2000's style guide for Pac-Man which specified his official colours in DIC Color Codes. (Though with PANTONE colours as an optional option.)

Awesome video Phil. As a graphic designer for over 20 years, this was right up my alley. I remember way back in the day how all these various agencies I worked at had every kind of Pantone book out there and there were whole rooms dedicated to nothing but Pantone books. But when I asked the owners or the creative directors why there wasn't a swatch book dedicated to nothing BUT CMYK colors (as opposed to just SPOT colors), they either shrugged their shoulders or said "Why don't you just use the Pantone breakdowns that are next to each color?" But the problem was that not very kind of Pantone color had these CMYK breakdowns. And since a majority of the work these agencies did was in the CMYK field and most computer monitors back in the day were quite untrustworthy when it came to color matching, this seemed like a huge flaw to me. And then Trumatch came out and I was just overjoyed!

Thanks so much for this. Pantone is so baffling in the modern era, but it's understandable that they have to try and survive somehow when their core idea has become dissolved into our digital world.

Very cool video. Only point I would refute and that's the assertion that Pantone use has dwindled. I work at a print shop and we get asked to use Pantone a lot. It's true, most people are happy with CMYK, but when a client wants something specific or they want a color to define their brand, it's Pantone all the way. It's especially helpful with the shrinkage in the industry because we get asked to match another printers color once in a while because that printer closed and we send a sample to the ink vendor and they supply us with a Pantone matched color.

My dad was an art director in the advertizing business who retired just as computers started invading that space, so I've heard of pantone, and he even would get the weird booket where the "pages" swing out when we'd be thinking about painting or remodelling, but it never occured to me how important it really is, and saw it as a relic from another era. Something I didn't realize about color until the last couple years while messing around with a digital color-picker is that CMYK and RGB are "negatives" of each other. It is of course pretty precise, but I feel like HSV is so much more intuitive to the layperson.

Phil, i just googled the title of the newest video I'm working on and this video popped up, and it was only uploaded an hour ago, perfect timing for a reference about color. Absolutely love all your videos. thanks as always for the great work!

Great video! Was Introduced to Pantone way back in High School Graphic Arts class. Nice to see some details about it’s origins

Understandable, have a nice day.

I don't think anyone would care, if they were not so greedy in how they monetize it.

As a screen printer pantone is super helpful. At the first shop i worked at there was a whole ink mixing system they paid for to have plastisol ink recipes of pantone colors. The current shop im at now we just make up the recipes ourselves but its really helpful to have a customer look at a book of swatches and be able to tell us thats the color they want and we have a great reference material. I have learned though that the two pantone books we have are from different years and the same pantone numbers dont always match up exactly

I worked for a large format printer and pantone was very handy! Just the temperature and humidity of a room could change the colour of a print. Even from the same printer a print colour could look noticeable different a year later. So having swatches was very handy to be able to compare to. Pantone's also handy because there's a surprising amount of colours that can only be shown in either rgb or cymk but not both. So if you're designing a brand that'll be using both print and screen design it's worth keeping in mind.

Finding a color and copyrighting it is like finding a lake and copyrighting the water

You failed to mention that Pantone's spot colors exist in a color space that CYMK and RGB combinations cannot recreate. As you pointed out, that is less relevant these days with the death of print.

That was an awesome video, thank you!! LOVED IT! Hope you one day expand on the opening part where you ask if they could lose it. I'm hoping there are challenges to their hold on the system where others could use it, myself. Thanks again for such an informative video!!!

As a designer the main problem with working at pantone's is like working with old an old computer with a certain amount of color.

As a European I had never heard of them before until LTT made a video about their 150k plastic colour chips, books and software. We use RAL

Printing has decreased in areas like publishing and marketing, but the internet and digital tech has also driven more print, it's just in other areas like packaging, signage, and apparel.

9:22 Finally ! Thanks for posting and it was interesting... For my logos, i have the CMYK, PMS, RGB colour names/formula recorded..

This guy needs his own History Channel show.

My family and I love giving each other the Pantone merch as gifts, but I can't imagine why literally anyone else would.

Pantone is like if the ietf was a private entity striving to make money from all of the protocols the internet relies on

One of the interesting bits that I learned as I got into machine embroidery is that pantone is everywhere. All of my threads are matched to a pantone color. Wild.

Great video!! So interesting...I had no idea there was such a colorful history there 😅

I personally didn’t even know about the issues with color back then. Pantone doing all of this color categorization is fascinating. Thanks for the video!

Your pantone book is expired, prepare for a cease and desist.

Linus! The crossover we never knew we needed

This is why I need Phil's investigative journalism. These are the topics I didn't know I needed to know.

Phill, please store that book in a dark drawer or dark bag-passive sunlight can dramatically effect the colors

Pantone is a useful system but i very much disgaree with them being the authority. For many people pantone gets misused for things outside of its intended usage. I run a fine art reproduction print shop and getting a pantone color is great and all but there are other ways to convey colors that dont require licensing fees.

Pantone is one of those companies that is ripe for disruption. You cannot copyright a L*a*b value or spectrographic data. But overcoming Pantone's first-to-market defacto-standard color books are the real challenge. It's the physical reference that is key, and weaning people off the comfort of that particular subjective reference is difficult. However, I think it's inevitable. It will just take time. Pantone is currently shooting themselves in the foot with their licensing shenanigans with Adobe, and designers are fed up. We need a new international color standard with open specifications that is neither controlled by a single company, nor locked behind a licensing organization (perhaps using RAL as a foundation). Something like a standard based on Lab that further specifies root additive pigments / dyes what are mathematically defined, to produce a reference result.

I worked at Claris in the 90s, so the version before FileMaker Inc. or the current rebranding back to Claris. The designer of the original logo specified the color using the Toyo Color System. Because nobody in the US or Europe knew much about Toyo, our someone in our publications and design groups found the nearest Pantone color and we switched to that. Though according to a buddy in the pubs group, the actual instruction to the printers was to add a quart of black to the Pantone formula.

Prime copyright system. Pantone is a totally reasonable company.

Ya, they're a colourful bunch over there at Pantone

I know all about Pantone Bridges and I’m still watching this.😅 so kudos to storytelling!

I think this one is gonna go big!

thank you for this cool brief history. i'm not a graphic design professional (nor do i even work in any design field), but i was fascinated to find out that because printed color degrades, the color chips and other references expire at some point. imagine spending hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars on a reference set only to have to purchase it against every few years.

being a millennial, as a kid we wore swatches, to express ourselves using a single color Another amazing video Phil! Taking the questions I didn't know I even wanted to ask, then answering them, and making a whole video explaining it all and taking us on the journey of discovery along the way Maybe, with colors and finding the truest one, is about the friends we make along the way, like my friend Teal, she's somewhat as chill as green, but kinda cool like blue is

Ultimate favourite creator crossover surprise for me, given I didn't read the description until Linus flashed onscreen. Great job!

Great video, Phil. I feel like you've really bumped up your editing, graphics and camerawork with this one. And don't worry, I've been following Linus for quite some time now. Glad you two got to collab.

CGP Printing owns a blue, possibly the unique Theophanu Blue

All I could think about Pantone now is their ties to Danaher, a medtech company that plans to price gouge on life-saving procedures (particularly in Tuberculosis detection).

Wow, really interesting video! Really well made, kept me watching all the way through, earned a sub!

I'm from Albania and I aprove of the use of the name Albania in this video.

Funny enough RAL is probably surviving in Europe because it's so old, German and actually part of official standards for certain uses like "what colour MUST a fire truck be painted in" and because it's colour space for design is actually not based on selected names but on CIELAB. Oh yeah and ofc the whole RAL thing is a non-profit company, so it can provide value to users and customers instead of providing value to it's shareholders 🙈

I think part of Phil's charm is that you can see just how FASCINATED he is by this kind of stuff, but you can just as easily see that he's embarrassed about being as excited as he is.

Hi from Sweden! Love your videos as always but nobody else seems to have mentioned this so I have to point out how unbelievably cool it was. The Larry Herbert introduction you gave me was a blinking animated avatar of him in his prime. It connected with me immediately and honestly blew my mind at how powerful it was. When discussing politics or people of a bygone era, to bring it right back to this century in this way is something I hope you continue to do in all your future videos. 4:46

Hey Phil, just throwing out the idea for a "How Crayola Won", just feel like it'd be interesting to hear about crayon history and why crayola crayons are so much better than competitors. Plus if anyone can make it interesting, it'd be you

This really needs to be an open standard. Im okay with pantone manufacturing matching sets and maybe pantenting how they're compostd but they should hold no trademark over the colors themselves.

a thing not mentioned is that RAL is also a government colour system in this case by DIN the German standardization agency so it is really affordable because it is by a non-profit. aside from that DIN is a real juggernaut when it comes to the standardization of things.

Funnily enough. I was telling some of my younger pals in the pub about the system a couple of weeks ago, for some unexplained reason. (It was the pub!) I'll have to show them this video, as you did a far better job of explaining it than I did. Nice work!

Better cut my eyes out then, I'm committing copyright theft

Time to reset the simulation.

There some YT shorts that have people matching colors with ease, they're actually fun to watch. No color swab book needed.

You read my mind. I've been looking for more information about Pantone and exactly...what...they are? And this answered so many of my questions. You're the man, Phil. Always looking forward to the next video.

I love the CGP easteregg 😊 amazing video ✨

The Kodak yellow film packaging story seems so intrinsically linked to Pantone in my mind... it's bizarre that this video glossed over the real-world examples of colour matching.

over the years in plastic molding we have had to match RAL , Munson and US Federal colors but never used pantone

i love the editing in this video bro

I should totally paint my dining room in Don't Sue Me Yellow.

I was always fascinating by Pantone’s hex chrome system. So vibrant!

i love your topics, man! something out of the ordinary

Can I just say, what an easy and visually interesting video to watch. I loved every moment! Thanks for uploading

As a person who loves looking at flags, this is really interesting!

I miss when Sephora was doing Pantone™️©️®️ Color of the Year ™️©️®️ makeup.

when he said linus i was really expecting the short linus

Very nice video, but a bit creepy that I was talking about Penton for the first time today and your video was suggested to me.

Weird. Here in Colombia, color itself cannot be matter of intellectual property. Pantone is just used as RGB or Focoltone. No one owns color. The only situation is if a brand, for example a soda brand wants to register a logo, has to specify the color of the logo and the shape. That's it. But color itself is own by no one, as in a reasonable place, and cannot be licensed.

7:35 Spot colour and process have different attributes, positives and negatives. So they are both commonly used to this day. I also can't really see what the number of copies has to do with that. That is more a factor to decide wether to use offset or digital. Positives of spot colours are: - Colours possible outside of CMYK. For example Neon or shiny colours. - If there are less than 4 colours on your Product, it might be a financially good idea to use spot colours. - Brands can have their own colors wich they can use on all their prints so that it looks consistent - There is less room for error with very small details on the print because there are not multiple layers of colours on top of each other that could fluctuate a tiny bit in their position. Positives of CMYK are: - Printing Products with 4 or more differentiable colours are propably cheaper in CMYK. - The whole circle of colours is possible to print with only 4 base colours, wich is cheap and easy. Offset is commonly used since mid-century. Especially since the rise of digital printers, it is mostly used for a big number of copies like magazines, posters and so on. But if you use CMYK or Pantone just depends on what suits better. And I can't imagine why this would have been different before the 2000s.

americans: here is the story about Pantone ruled the world. in 1963 it changed everything. and it's owning color (cause we like catchphrases) metric world: just enjoying RAL since 1927.

Great video! Very interesting, thank you

FINALLY i understand wtf are the rights of Pantone on colours, and its isnt even that hard to explain

great video, thank you!