Pantone Colour of the Year – 18-3838

Pantone began life in the early 1950’s owned by the printers M & J. Levine Advertising but the foundations that are known today were founded in 1962 when it was purchased by a long term employee Lawrence Herbert who’d been there since 1956 (my birth year – weird or what?) Pantone was originally a tiny company that created colour cards for cosmetics but with the new owner came a new broom which swept shades of colour away in seconds and by 1963 it had developed the first ever colour matching system. In essence Pantone is a giant colour matching system which standardises colours in order to clarify colours match perfectly without people intervention. One way it does this is with the CMYK model, a four plate colour print method that uses Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black to produce perfect color.