Pantone 321

The industrial world functions by adherence to standards. DIN (German Institute for Standardization)
is pretty much the de facto global standards agency. interestingly, the first standard DIN proclaimed (1918)
pertained to machine tool taper pins. Over 30,000 have been issued since.

An american corporation, Pantone, has emerged as the standard setting entity for color.

So what about Pantone 321? If you viewed a video posted several days ago, "turbine lathe, Mulheim" then you were exposed to this color. It is the official hue of german conglomerate --Siemens.
In the circumstance of the video, P-321 is found on console of Siemens 840D control. And it is also seen
in very tall letters proclaiming facility identity as Siemens Power Generation, Mulheim.

Siemens calls the corporate color "petrol" and specifies Pantone 321.

If you are a trendy machine tool builder and want to coordinate your product line with what models on the runways of Paris and Milan are wearing, click below for color of the year.

Fashion + Home - Pantone Color of the Year for 2012: Tangerine Tango PANTONE 17-1463


a small pdf including Pantone 321

http://www.flagco.com/pdfs/pantonecolorchart.pdf



jh

JHOLLAND1 said:

The industrial world functions by adherence to standards. DIN (German Institute for Standardization)
is pretty much the de facto global standards agency. interestingly, the first standard DIN proclaimed (1918)
pertained to machine tool taper pins. Over 30,000 have been issued since.

An american corporation, Pantone, has emerged as the standard setting entity for color.

Click to expand...

Interesting, but factually incorrect. Color is a physical phenomena, and as such doesn't require a commerical standards body. Pantone has howerver been very successful in selling their product.

The problem with pantone and other such naive systems is that is does not take into account the non-linearity of human perception of color. Many different mixed hues appear as the same color to us because we only have 3 different types of cones in the eye, and the mapping from those 3 sources to a single 1-dimensional hue decsriptor is incomplete.

If you are interested in a rigorus color system, the International Commision on Illumination is the place to go.

CIE 1931 color space - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

another view

jbc

Thanks for the reference to CIE system. I found this statement in a recent article"

"The three dimensional color space CIE XYZ is the basis for all color management systems."

After reading several papers on CIE I would agree. But in my opinion, the Pantone offerings are complimentary
to CIE. Here is why:

CIE is based on primary colors linked to the 3 groups of rods in the human retina. So this gives red, green, blue colors which now are called additive. In the interval since 1931, when CIE was published, other color schemes with equal validity and more flexibility for industry emerged. Notably, CMYK or cyan, magenta, yellow, black. This system is called subtractive. And it is what color printers, etc tend to use.

Pantone offers both systems to industry. Lets say a textile manufacturer wants a color of the year, 2005.
That would be "violet tulip". Pantone will advise on dyes and even supply pure cotton samples up to 150 yards for color swatches. Same for coatings-paints.

CIE has fallen out of favor as far as what the authors of the 1931 document offered,
Replacing it is the color opponency system proposed by Ewald Hering in 1892.
Well, the Scandinavian Colour Institute pushes this calling it "Natural Colour System".
They appear to be the primary competitor of Pantone.
Pantone, it appears, is more successful in the market place.

swedish website

NCS Colour

jh

Color is way more complicated than a couple of posts on PM will convey

"Standardize color" is perhaps unfortunately ambitious marketing language. However, for certain market segments (in the graphic arts, primarily) Pantone is indeed the de facto standard for communicating color choices. Companies that require specific colors as part of their "corporate identity" will specify them as Pantone colors, because that's the color language used by printers and other vendors of graphic arts materials. It is certainly not the only means of communicating color choices, even commercially. Even in the ink-on-paper market segment, it has competition from Trumatch, Focoltone, SpectraMaster, Toyo and DIC. And the primary process color Pantone series is heavily misused to communicate non-process colors.

However, it's silly to critique a Pantone color series against CIE RGB or Lab (or L*a*b*). Pantone doesn't pretend to model the human observer, avoid metamerism, or be any sort of device-independent representation of color. The Pantone process color and spot color series define their colors in terms of Pantone inks, and directly give the recipes for mixing the color from those specific inks! Totally different in approach, intent, and implementation from CIE observer models, and rightly so. The further you get from the specific Pantone inks (CMYK plus OG in Hexachrome plus specials like flourescents), the less useful the Pantone systems are. On the other hand, Pantone caters directly to markets that are concerned with color on paper, fabric and (to a lesser extent) plastic, with distinct series for the different substrates.

sfriedberg said:

The further you get from the specific Pantone inks (CMYK plus OG in Hexachrome plus specials like flourescents), the less useful the Pantone systems are.

Click to expand...

Thankfully photospectrometers are inexpensive in these modern times. Anyone serious about color should have at least a little familiarity with the Observer Model, and understand that reflectance varies with illumination.

You would have thought that Siemens would use an RAL colour

Here is clip from Siemens corporate identity guidlines.



Both HKS and RAL are german color standards. But sponsoring organizations seem more academic in nature.
A Sikkens color is provided. Sikkens is part of conglomerate AksoNobel. A Dutch corporation doing 20 billion usd yearly. Sikkens coatings cover Airbus skins.

Siemens branded merchandise includes polo shirts and feed caps. Well, essentially all of this category leisure wear is asian in origin. And Pantone has pretty much a lock on pigment, dyes, and mordants in textile making.

Machine tool colors rarely stir emotions. But the commercial world of color is largely feminine determined.
A major reason why is the fact that 8% of human males have some form of color blindness. And this might explain unimaginative color schemes found on a majority of industrial tools.




jh