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Comment by Cider9986 | Hacker News Reader

Motorola uses pantone colors but I think the color is the least of their issues: https://m.gsmarena.com/motorola_signature_27_5g-14955.php

It turns out after a second of searching it's not really about that. What it is about I do not know how it helps the phone.

https://www.pantone.com/na/en-us/color-systems/pantone-color...

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It's a standard way to ensure that different printers print the same colour for branding purposes (unless of course, one is large enough to formulate and dictate one's own colour à la Coca-Cola and their red).

c.f.,

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1928117.Four_Colors_One_...

(or some similar text on 4-color process)

And of course, we all owe a great debt to Willis Carrier whose efforts to regularize temperature and humidity for the sake of consistent and accurate printing colour reproduction resulted in the invention of air conditioning.

It is, but there are a few caveats.

Usually you tell the printers to print in a specific Pantone colour or using CMYK. The Pantone shade tells them what ink mix to use but it's not what the final printed product will look like as that depends on what you're printing on. Say you've a coffee shop and have your logo printed on a white paper cup and also on a brown Kraft box the same Pantone ink will look very different.

Tring to work back from "I want all my printed items to look like Pantone #12345" to selecting the required inks for different materials is a very hard job.

Another problem is Pantone release a new book each year. You'd like to think that is just to ensure the reference colour charts don't fade etc, but they sometimes change the actual colour mix.

In 2023 Pantone changed how they mixed colours [1] which means some visual differences. We had a customer using 544u and that changed quite dramatically with the new mix, all of their branding looked quite different. We had a long fight with the printers trying to resolve this.

[1] https://www.printweek.com/news/article/pantone-explains-cont... > all Pantone Colors were now mixed from 11 base inks plus a colourless extender, a simplification on the previous 18 base inks.

Yeah, problems like that are why I insisted on having a chip book so that I could tear off a chip to present to the client when they signed off, and to affix to the proofs sent to the printer.

It was expensive, but it also ensured that everyone was on the same page (literally).

We keep samples of every print run and also use that to cut out and send samples telling the printers to match. They can drift over time so by keeping every run we can monitor.

Some printer are better than others and although often you get what you pay for it's far from guaranteed.

Aren't pantone colours most of the times a spot colour in branding at least in large volume printing? (fifth and sixth rollers if available) Or are most of the prints done solely on cmyk these days?

PANTONE spot colours include a sub-set which can be represented using 4-colour process (more-or-less).

Yes, presses with an additional unit for a spot colour are more common these days, but it's still an additional plate charge and costs accordingly.

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