The Colour System That Revolutionised Design: The Story Behind Pantone

Picture this: you walk into a camera shop in the 1950s and see rows of Kodak film boxes, all in slightly different shades of yellow. Some are vibrant, others look dull, almost orange. Which do you pick? Most people back then instinctively took the brightest boxes — assuming they were fresher — unaware that this wasn’t about film quality, but rather a basic flaw: different printers used different standards for colour reproduction. This surprisingly simple anecdote triggered the creation of the world’s most influential colour reference system for designers: the Pantone Matching System.​

The story of how a young chemistry and biology graduate transformed a bankrupt print shop into a global colour empire is rather remarkable. It’s a tale about noticing a problem, about seeing opportunity where others only saw daily inconvenience, and how a technical fix evolved into a global language. Because Pantone is, at the end of the day, a language: one that designers, printers, textile manufacturers, and all kinds of industries use to talk about colour — without ambiguity, without that endless “what do you mean by sky blue, exactly?”

From a Failing Print Shop to the Global Language of Colour

This story starts in New Jersey in the 1950s, when brothers Mervin and Jesse Levine founded M&J Levine Advertising, a small commercial print business. Their bread and butter was colour cards for the cosmetics and fashion industry, made with a rather ramshackle method using some 60 different base pigments, blended by sheer trial and error. It was a typical family business, surviving more than thriving.​

Then in 1956, the Levines made an unwittingly momentous decision: they hired Lawrence Herbert, a recent Hofstra University graduate in chemistry and biology, part-time. Herbert, back from a stint serving in Korea, figured this gig was a placeholder before medical school. Fate had other plans.​

Herbert quickly diagnosed an industry-wide ailment that afflicted not only M&J Levine but every player in the graphic arts: there was no clear, standardised language for specifying colour. Each new print job was a shifting argument of vivid reds, summer-ocean blues, “apple green, but not too harsh” — all subjective and difficult to reproduce. The outcome: frustration, lost money, botched jobs and unhappy customers.​

Using his chemistry job, Herbert started systematically improving pigment production in the company. First, almost counterintuitively, he slashed the pigment inventory. From sixty original base colours, he reduced everything to just ten. With these ten, he drafted up meticulous, formulaic “recipes” for thousands of shades — producing colours anyone could recreate exactly, any time, anywhere.​

By 1962, Herbert had accomplished something almost magical: the print division, powered by colour consistency, turned a decent profit whilst the other side of M&J’s business was in debt to the tune of $50,000. When the Levines decided to sell, Herbert saw a once-in-a-lifetime chance. He bought the technical assets — locking the deal at $50,000, the exact sum needed to pay off company debts. The name for his new venture? “Pantone” — a made-up word combining Greek “pan,” for all or many, with “tone”.​

The following year, 1963, Herbert introduced the first edition of the Pantone Matching System: a swatch “fan book” of over a thousand colours, each with its own number and, crucially, an exact mixing recipe. Its power was its simplicity: instead of saying, “that nice red from last month,” a designer now specified “Pantone 185 C” — and any printer, anywhere, could match it, down to the molecule.​

Kodak and the Problem of Yellow Boxes

Enter Kodak. Their plight demonstrates the precise headache Pantone solved. Kodak, with its iconic yellow film boxes, was a heavyweight in photography and packaging. Yet with so many printers producing their boxes, all those shades of yellow varied just enough that packs on shop shelves came in a confusing rainbow: some bold and lemony, others pale and sickly. Consumers then subconsciously preferred the brighter yellows — mistaking them for fresher film.​

In reality, the colour difference was meaningless in terms of product quality. It was just sloppy colour management. For Kodak, a branding nightmare: their signature yellow, meant to be instantly recognisable, instead became a source of confusion and perceived inconsistency.​

Once Pantone’s system gained traction, Kodak was among the first giants to standardise corporate colour using Pantone’s codes. Now, whatever printer and wherever in the world, the Kodak yellow would be precisely the same, thanks to one simple code — a problem solved at last.​

Years later, in 2007, this relationship grew even closer, as Kodak and Pantone jointly released the “PANTONE Color Reference Book for NEXPRESS Digital Production Color Presses”. This special guide showcased Pantone’s official colours on one page, and how those colours printed on Kodak’s digital press on the facing page, letting professionals judge colour fidelity with their own eyes.​

The Masterstroke: From Niche Invention to Cultural Phenomenon

Herbert’s real genius wasn’t just the technical breakthrough, but in how he seeded Pantone into the mainstream. The big ink manufacturers ignored him, so he handed the system to the small and midsize local suppliers, the independent ink mixers.​

Within a fortnight, Herbert had sold 20 licences for his system. By 1968, Pantone Matching System was an industry staple. By the ’70s, Pantone swatch books had topped 100,000 sales, and spread like wildfire throughout plastics, fashion, textiles, all manner of industrial and creative sectors. The leap to digital in the ’80s and the start of the Pantone Color Institute in 1986 cemented the brand’s global reach.​

Pantone’s lesson? That the biggest advances aren’t always due to new inventions, but to making what already exists reliable and universally accessible. Herbert didn’t invent new colours; he made talking about them as quick and scientific as specifying a phone number. That was what the world needed.

Today, when a designer insists a logo must be “Pantone 485 C”; when Tiffany’s guards its “Pantone 1837 Blue” like Fort Knox; or when the world’s designers wait in December for the “Color of the Year”, we’re seeing Herbert’s legacy in action. A legacy that transformed colour from a slippery, subjective notion into a global, precise language — conceived by a chemist who simply refused to accept “that’s just how it is.”​

Pantone’s story reminds us: Innovation can be less about new things, more about making sense of things. Sometimes, the revolution is not “what”, but “how.” And in colour, that “how” changed forever the way the world manufactures, sells, and dreams in technicolour.

References

• Eiseman, L. (2006). Color: Messages & Meanings: A PANTONE Color Resource. Hand Books Press. An insightful dive into the psychology and communication strategies underlying Pantone’s colour choices, written by the executive director of the Pantone Color Institute.
• Eiseman, L., & Recker, K. (2011). Pantone: The Twentieth Century in Color. Chronicle Books. A visually rich journey through 20th-century colour trends, with over 200 key artworks, design products, and historical moments contextualising Pantone’s impact.
• Gage, J. (1999). Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction. University of California Press. An academic cornerstone for understanding the history and cultural power of colour, setting the stage for Pantone’s industrial revolution.
• Gijsenij, A., Lucassen, M., & Gevers, T. (2021). Analysing a decade of Colors of the Year. Color Research & Application, 46(1), 16–31. A scientific review of Pantone’s Colors of the Year, studying how chromatic trends shape and reflect global culture.
• de Medeiros Dantas, Í. J., & de Brito Mendes, L. (2021). Semiotic Analysis of Pantone’s® Colors of the Year in the 2000s. Eikon Journal on Semiotics and Culture, 4, 1–14. A semiotic and cultural reading of Pantone’s annual colour ‘product’ — how it mirrors and creates social context.

Original text in Spanish in:

https://proyectografico.com/2025/11/25/historia-estandar-pantone/