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Pantone Colors: What They Are and How to Use Them

Pantone Colors: What They Are and How to Use Them

Let’s unlock the secrets of Pantone colors to find out how designers, artists, and manufacturers use them in both print and web designs.

Learn everything you need to know about designing with Pantone colors, how Pantone chooses their Color(s) of the Year, and where you can find even more color inspiration.

But first! How color savvy are you? Take this quiz and find out:


What Is Pantone?

Pantone is a world-renowned authority on color, producing a standardized Pantone Matching System that allows individuals to reproduce colors exactly, regardless of their equipment or location.

Having started out as a small printing business in the 1950s, Pantone has since become widely recognized for releasing industry-specific color guides and their forecasted Color of the Year, which is announced annually each December.

Pantone's 2021 Color Palette
Image by contributor Olga Zarytska.

What Are Pantone Colors?

Pantone was established in the 1950s in New Jersey as a printing business. In 1963, Lawrence Herbert, an employee of the company since 1956, bought the company and radically changed its direction, building Pantone into the color powerhouse we recognize today. 

  • Explore a world of color with hundreds of color combinations, schemes, and palettes using Shutterstock’s online Color Tool

Famous for developing the Pantone Matching System, Pantone facilitates the use of standardized spot colors across a wide range of products and industries, including graphic design, fashion, product design, furniture, and printing. Pantone is also recognized globally for its color expertise, with the company releasing a Color Trend Forecasting report on an annual basis. In this report, Pantone identifies the colors which industry professionals can use to tap into consumer trends for the year ahead, as well as the much-anticipated Color of the Year—a color or color duo chosen by Pantone’s color experts as a particularly on-trend hue for commercial design in the coming months.

Pantone's 2021 Colors of the Year
Pantone chose two contrasting colors for its 2021 Color of the Year—Illuminating and Ultimate Gray. Image by contributor Efetova Anna.

What Is the Pantone Matching System?

At the heart of Pantone is the Pantone Matching System (PMS), in which colors are organized into a long list of numbered swatches. Originally developed in 1963, the system ensures that a manufacturer can look up a color using the PMS and achieve an exact color match to another manufacturer, regardless of location. These standardized Pantone colors play an extremely important role throughout the design and manufacturing process across a wide range of industries, as they create a common language for designers to use when communicating exact colors to manufacturers, partners, retailers, and customers. 

The PMS was initially developed to create a standard of colors for printing, but these tones can also be converted into RGB or HEX codes for use on the web. To minimize the discrepancies between print and digital media, Pantone offers a variety of tools, such as Pantone’s Color Finder tool, allowing designers to convert print Pantone swatches for digital use.

Pantone's Color Finder Tool
Pantone’s Color Finder tool allows designers to choose and convert thousands of Pantone colors between print and web uses.

How Do Pantone Colors Work in Commercial Design and Manufacturing?

There are now more than 3,000 Pantone colors that cover the full spectrum, with each swatch assigned a unique number and name. These Pantone swatches are all intended to be used as spot colors, meaning they have to be specially set up as separate swatches to CMYK or RGB swatches in digital design software. The Pantone system also allows for many special color types to be produced, such as metallics and fluorescents.

Color Holographic
Image by contributor mything.

In order to bridge the gap for printers, there’s a particular subset of Pantone colors that are able to be reproduced using CMYK printing. Generally, however, Pantone colors should be used as spot colors to ensure that the Pantone Matching System works effectively. 

The reason Pantone is so intrinsic to the design and manufacturing industries is that it promotes consistency across locations, suppliers, and equipment. Without Pantone, a designer could request that a store sign should be printed using a particular CMYK yellow swatch, but there’s no guarantee that the same color could be reproduced accurately on a T-shirt intended for store personnel if the T-shirt was printed by a different manufacturer. The designer could physically request a proof of both the business card and T-shirt, and cross-compare them by eye, but this would still require the designer, the business card printer, and the T-shirt printer to be within the same locality. With many products inevitably being produced further afield or using different printing equipment, it’s simply not practical to use visual assessment alone. It’s at this point of production that the Pantone Matching System ensures an accurate color match.

To maintain color consistency, designers use Pantone Color Guides to identify their desired color. Once a color is chosen, the designer can simply specify the number of the Pantone color to the manufacturer or printer. The manufacturer can then use this number as a reference, following the Pantone guide to replicate it accurately. This is the easiest way to guarantee color matching across or between organizations—however large or globalized—and to simplify quality control.

Color Guide
Pantone’s color guide makes it easy to match colors. Image by contributor guruXOX.

How Do I Use Pantone Colors?

Pantone colors have been developed to introduce a greater level of precision to manufacturing, design, and textile production. By using the Pantone system, color matching is standardized, making it easy to communicate with manufacturers and achieve the correct color every time.

In addition, Pantone provides a wide range of Color Guides (and other color selection tools), to allow you to browse colors specifically tailored for your industry and media type, whether it’s a printed graphic design project or a textile for furniture design

Pantone Colors
Pantone has an extensive, and impressive, range of colors. Image by contributor Victority.

These Pantone Color Guides aren’t cheap to buy, but because Pantone uses a standardized system that’s only periodically adjusted, the swatches will be accurate for years to come. In short, if you work in any design field that involves commercial manufacturing, and therefore communicating swatch colors to a printer or manufacturer, it’s worth investing in a Color Guide specific to your industry. For designers working across multiple design disciplines—graphics, products, textiles, etc.—a Color Guide tailored for each discipline is also useful. 

For designers not used to working for commercial manufacturers, the Pantone system can seem a bit daunting, and perhaps even unnecessary at first. However, dipping a toe into the Pantone system can be a fantastic educational resource for designers looking to learn more about the role color plays in commercial manufacturing. You don’t need to invest in a printed Color Guide to do this either—the full range of Pantone swatches are easily accessible from most mainstream design apps, including Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, meaning you can browse thousands of Pantone colors directly from the Swatches panel. 

InDesign Pantone
The full library of 3,000+ Pantone swatches are accessible from the Swatches panel in Adobe design apps, including InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop.

What Is the Pantone Color of the Year?

Pantone chooses a Color of the Year, making the announcement in December to anticipate the new year ahead. The Color of the Year announcement draws a huge amount of press attention, with the choice of color the result of months, if not years, of market research and trend analysis from Pantone’s panel of color experts. 

While the Color of the Year is undoubtedly an effective technique to draw media attention towards Pantone and the design industries as a whole, its principle role is intended to align the branding, marketing, and creative processes of designers across the world. Each Color of the Year has been selected to tap into current consumer trends and desires, helping designers to create products that will appeal to buyers over the coming months. 

For 2021, Pantone selected a duo of colors, Ultimate Gray (PANTONE 17-5104) and Illuminating (PANTONE 13-0647). This high-contrast pairing of gray and yellow was chosen by Pantone to convey “a message of strength and hopefulness that is both enduring and uplifting,” optimistic colors that look forward to a brighter year ahead.  

Color of the Year
Image by contributor Ume Illustration.

Pantone’s previous Colors of the Year have included:

Decade of Pantone
Pantone’s Color of the Year choices over the past decade, two years of which have featured a duo of colors (2016 and 2021).

Where Can I Discover More Color Inspiration?

Alongside Pantone’s annual Color Guides, other leading design authorities also release their own color trend forecasts. In some cases, these are specific to particular industries, such as interior design (for which paint brands Little Greene and Farrow and Ball release frequent trend reports and new colors). 

With color choices also becoming an increasingly important part of web design and online marketing, some companies formulate forecasting specifically tailored for digital designers and social marketers. Shutterstock releases an annual Color Trend report using search data to confirm which colors are seeing increased activity, and are likely to be popular and trending in the year to come.

For 2021, a trio of colors—soothing Set Sail Champagne, lucky Fortuna Gold, and dynamic Tidewater Green—were chosen based on the HEX code data for each image pixel. 

Fortuna Gold
One of Shutterstock’s trio of 2021 Color Trends, Fortuna Gold is a molten, antique gold that brings warmth and luxury to designs.

With more businesses realizing how intrinsic color is for their marketing strategies, as well as for the products they sell, color forecasting is becoming an increasingly crowded market, with Pantone (albeit still the leading authority in color trends) no longer the only resource for color-hungry designers and manufacturers.

In addition to Pantone and Shutterstock, other color system resources include HKS, RAL (two European alternatives to Pantone’s PMS), DIC (a Japanese color printing brand), and NCS (the Scandinavian Color Institute). For web designers, Adobe’s color palette tool, Adobe Color, is a free online resource for formulating palettes that can be converted between print and web models, and can also be integrated with other Adobe apps such as InDesign or Photoshop.


Looking to Delve Deeper into the World of Color?

Color is the emotive heart of design, able to instantly transform the mood and personality of projects and products. For most individuals, colors feel instinctual—you respond subconsciously to different colors on an emotional level—which perhaps explains why Pantone’s systematic way of ordering color has become so widely known and respected over time.

If the emotive quality of color can be systemized, this hands over significant power to marketers and designers who can create products with greater consumer desirability. 


If you want to make color a key part of your creative practice, it pays to do your color research. These articles will help you embrace the whole color spectrum in your design and photography projects:

License this cover image via Yuliia Zaitseva.

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