back
18 comments
The content of the article relevant to its title is basically this:

"In 1963, an American chemistry graduate named Lawrence Herbert devised a system to standardize color, specifying the exact ink formula for every shade."

How he did this, how quickly it took off, what challenges he faced, how people worked with color before, why Pantone's system was better -- the kind of things a New Yorker piece with this title might cover -- is utterly absent.

The rest of it is gimmicky fluff about how Pantone has become a pop culture thing (not that I've noticed -- and I worked with Pantone colors for years when I did print work -- but apparently in some places).

"Math is hard. Let’s go shopping”.

I would like to read an article that covered all the areas you raise, but I suspect we would be in the minority.

> The rest of it is gimmicky fluff about how Pantone has become a pop culture thing (not that I've noticed -- and I worked with Pantone colors for years when I did print work -- but apparently in some places).

Not quite a huge thing, I'd say, but you can easily find Pantone color cards for children, as well as Pantone iPhone cases. And I live in a country where nobody cares about design. :)

I was about to rebuke, but then I retread the headline. Not even half-way through had I forgotten that this article was about how the company became an authority and not how it became a pop culture thing. Which is also an interesting point in its own right.

I actually fail to see how an honest headline wouldn't have been just as good at attracting readers.

Man, colors are hard and pigment based color systems are harder. One can't just punch in a Hex value.

When manufacturing products, Pantone is fantastic as a resource because one suddenly has a definitive chip to point to thats standardized everywhere. Specifying a product with a Chinese vendor that is two different shades of black would get nowhere without Pantone. "Black" and "Dark Black" don't translate well.

Othertimes and other colors, Pantone just doesn't have the exact right shade. Especially in pop-ier neons that were in style in the late '00's. Pantone released a supplement booklet but even that is limited. One can go deeper and work with Pantone to develop your brand's own color which they will keep on file and not release to others. International Klein Blue. Tiffany. All have interesting histories.

Get it right though and it's magic. Your textile ribbon that holds in your batteries will match your plastic will match your manual will match your packaging. It's a great feeling.

If you want to test your color acumen, give this site a shot: http://www.xrite.com/online-color-test-challenge - if you can pass it without batting an eye then you may have a good career in Pearl sorting or factory quality control ahead of you.

Pantone just sells color samples. An authority on color is the Color Association of the United States.[1] They issue "color forecasts" as to which colors will be "in" next season. This used to matter more when the US had a clothing industry.

They also used to orchestrate the color cycle of consumer electronics, from grey to beige to black to white and back again. (You thought that happened by accident?) But they no longer have enough clout to do that.

[1] http://www.colorassociation.com/pages/6-forecasts

Who decided the move to rose gold? It seems like Apple released that color at exactly the right time, so I thought it was a fashion industry decision they had bought access to.
Even though I don't work with photo realistic images and thus have to ensure accurate color, I still enjoy my NEC 2490WUXi2 monitor bought back in the day when I was an image editor. I was targeting sRGB for a webzine I was a part of.

As applications break out of the grayness that once defined them and become HTML5 based, designers would do well to understand how their colors will be displayed. Eventually, all displays will probably be IPS or some similar tech and be calibrated at the factory. The new Microsoft Surface Book has good and accurate colors from what I understand.

I think factory color calibration for every device with a display is a pipe dream. It simply doesn't provide enough value to the user for the extra effort you'd have to go to.

I think the more realistic option is some sort of easy home calibration solution, perhaps leveraging smartphones or consumer DSLRs.

The end goal will be displays that have extremely low per-copy variation and therefore don't need individual calibration for reasonably accurate colour. Most of Apple's products with retina displays are really good out of the box.

(Of course, this all depends on your definition of "accurate". We're still not there yet for professional colour work.)

There's also a strong temptation to increase the saturation and gamma to stand out in brief side-by-side comparisons. It's the visual equivalent of loudness war audio mastering.
My local sports stadium (Allianz Stadium, Sydney Australia) recently installed two enormous ultra-wide 27 by 10 metre screens. They are astonishingly clear and bright, however the saturation is pumped up so hard that grass looks like Simpsons-esque nuclear sludge and many team uniforms look fluorescent or luminescent.

It's particularly surprising because it's constantly being used to replicate the reality right in front of it. You can just look at the pitch to see what grass should look like.

No, you see, the display shows you what the grass really is and what it would look like to you if your eyes could pick out the vibrant hues in real life. /s
We should really retire sRGB as the standard monitor colourspace and use 16-bit linear floats per channel. Every single image operator gets really tricky if you work in 8-bit sRGB and most don't bother, i.e. they treat 0-255 as linear values and everything from anti-aliasing to blitting to blurring is absolutely broken in all standard desktop applications. It's a bit better if you do 3d rendering with OpenGL/Direct3D, since their entire pipeline is linear and all you have to do is set the "this texture is in sRGB colourspace" bit on every texture and convert the final colour from linear RGB to sRGB in your shader.
Meh, it's a good smell test. If a given tool doesn't even get sRGB correct, there's probably several dozen other ways the designer failed to understand how graphics work.

Today I can just pop the first image on this page <http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma.html> into an image editor. If I don't see the Dalai Lama after downscaling, it's probably a poor quality editor beside its sRGB fail. It's like Van Halen's M&Ms.

Remove the extraneous angle bracket to fix the link.

Mac OS X's exposé does some funky stuff to that image :)

Surprising that HN includes the angle bracket as part of the link... I'm pretty sure using angle brackets like that to delineate a link is recommended in some major RFC...

Fixed link here, thanks: http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma.html

I used to own a LCD2490WUXI. But, after I realized how bad color profile support is in most apps, I eventually replaced it with a trio of U2414H and calibrate them the dumb way.