Ah interesting. I mean it's not gonna be much help, but I would basically just create a color palette in some Adobe program and then match pantone swatches to it. As it sounds like you've seen, color theory can get really complicated.

A nice tool is Adobe color. It won't give you a set of 12 but it could make for some good starting points as they have a number or ways to use different colors and push and pull them together as a set.

Anyways, good luck!

Lmk if I didn't understand your idea right, but based on my understanding of what you're proposing:

The issue with color matching is really the physical world. Mixing paints and printers aren't perfect but also leds and screen technologies are all a little different. Like one batch of leds may be a little more red, another a little more blue, so even if the computer gives the led the same color data, it will look different in the physical world.

But I think your idea could work, but you would need to control every stage of production and keep everything calibrated together:

• all designers computers in the same color space
• all monitors calibrated the same
• all printers calibrated the same (both in office and at in the print shop)
• and if you are using any digital displays, ideally those are all calibrated as well.

I think it's possible, it's just a lot of work for not much reward. And note that like anything in the physical world, it all deteriorates over time from wear or sunlight or whatever, so all those things would need to be calibrated regularly and done together.

Instead, we usually try and keep our pantone chips away from light, sometimes need to rebuy a pack, and just eyeball color matching with printers. It's generally assumed everyone in the chain has access to a well kept at least basic set of pantone chips.

Digital is a mess and basically we just don't have control (although I don't think ive ever used Pantone for anything digital). We test on as many different devices we can, but there's always going to be some folks with really terrible phone screens or something.

Graphic designer with experience with print and print production

Thank you!

I COULDN'T HELP MYSELF

Flexo, give me strength

Quick thought experiment.

If the all the rulers in the world were gone, how would we know how long 1cm is?

Now honestly in our day to day lives, we could probably estimate it and each person might have a slightly different measurement off by a mm or two, but not a big deal.

But if you need to be really exact, like for engineering, you all need to agree on what exactly is that length down to the nano-meter or whatever.

Same with color. RGB is like everyone estimating colors and it may be a little (or a lot) off from one monitor to the next. But Pantone makes and licences out THE rulers for color, makes sure they all match, etc.

Sure, someone else could make their own "rulers for color" standard (with blackjack and hookers), but then you need a huge mass of people to all agree to change over to the new standard for it to be useful.

For most people in their day to day, hex codes and rgb (or equivalent cmyks) are just fine. But pantone is extra granular to make sure you are all using the SAME reference.

Edit: Also, I find this really interesting. There's an object that was for a long time used as THE ideal 1kg. [The International Prototype of the Kilogram] (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Prototype_of_the_Kilogram).

Basically all of the above/whatever you have access to.

For production runs, ordering proofs of your work is very important before they run too many. You can make adjustments in a lot of different ways. But pantone is REALLY helpful so you and the printers have the same reference point for a color (theoretically).

I love this stuff, if you have any questions I'll ramble on about print production.

*has edited their qmk file twice

My God, there's narrative all over this place!