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Every designer knows Pantone’s color matching system, in which a color’s specific number identifies the precise shade with fidelity through print jobs, identity work, web executions—all the places a signature color might be used. Pantone may not be a household name on par with Crayola or Kraft, but that’s exactly the point: Its branded products invite you into design’s inside-baseball syntax, a badge of the buyer’s knowledge. Like a Polaroid, the Pantone logo and number frames a basic solid color in a vigorous, compact meta-commentary.

Eyeglasses manufactured under Pantone license by EyeConcept.

In other instances, the Pantone branding becomes its own unifier in an otherwise disparate or undistinguished collection of items, as when the utterly basic Uniqlo and Gap T-shirts are given an evocative whiff in their Pantone co-branding. If white plates and saucers are a crying bore, why choose a color, anyway? Millions of colors, subtly harmonized, are matchy-matchy enough as a group as a single color alone. At the more anal end of the spectrum, Kathy Kitchenware can now pursue a rigorously exact color match for all her flatware, down to the PMS number.

But not all of the company’s product partnerships are geared at direct-to-consumer sales. For example, these personalized iPod and iPod Touch cases run $19.99 each with free personalization.

Sonia Spencer Designs cufflinks. Reversible Cufflinks Kelly Green, $81 (left). Cufflink Blanc de Blanc, $67 (right).





Red Pantone Tin, £11.02

SeaVees 09/63 sneaker series, based on colors from the original Pantone Matching System.


Success breeds (unauthorized) imitators, some of them damn clever, if unlikely to get made. You have to admire punster-designer Paul Finn of Fitzroy & Finn, who coined the Pantone Swatch-watch (get it?) with Ben Lancaster of Stylo. Not a half-bad brand association for a strategy based on a rhyme.
Other Pantone homages take ordinary multi-colored objects, like Rubik’s Cubes, and deliver them back subtly altered, less garish to the design-tuned eye.

But maybe the best extensions of Pantone’s brands have happened outside the product-purview of products entirely. Artist Pierre David’s project The Human Pantone (above) echoes Byron Kim’s 1991 painting on race, Synecdoche, while Basheer Graphic Books promoted the Pantone color guide itself to art students with their pixilated Pantone Rainbow. The most exhilarating Pantone brand cross-overs are those that play openly with this tension: the chaotic spores of color, floating into every corner of the world, corralled for an instant into a numeric shape.


The Pantone Rainbow, designed by Bates 141 Jakarta for Basheer Graphic Books.