What is Pantone?
If you’ve ever held color-printed piece in your hands, there’s a good chance you’ve been touched by Pantone. The self-described “authority on color”, Pantone has become an integral part of graphic design and printing, greatly influencing the color of our world. Since 1963, Pantone has been the force behind the printing industry’s color standard, the Pantone Matching System (PMS). PMS is a standardized color reproduction system whereby different manufacturers and printers can accurately reproduce the same set of colors without direct contact with one another. This is significant for brands, because of the importance that consistent color reproduction has on brand identity and packaging. Color plays such a crucial role in brand association that some companies even commission their own colors. (Tiffany’s, well-known for its signature teal blue, actually has its own custom, trademarked Pantone color, PMS 1837.)

In the last 40 years, Pantone has become the de-facto print color standard  by eclipsing its competitors and evolving into other arenas. But despite Pantone’s ubiquitous presence in the drawers of any self-respecting designer, and its use in all major design software, the company has recently made some significant product line changes—changes which are important to anyone who needs to select or print colors. We’re hoping to break down these changes and give designers, printers, and color aficionados some much-needed insight. In our first installment, we’ll discuss Pantone’s Goe ink system. And then, in part two, we’ll give you the latest on Pantone’s brand-new replacement for the PMS, called Pantone Plus.

We got the inside scoop from Pantone while talking with Giovanni Marra, Pantone’s Director of Corporate Marketing. To add a more diverse set of views, we also interviewed a select group of offset printers (Elk Grove Graphics, Darwill Press, Van Lanen and Lithographix) and ink manufacturers (Sinclair Ink Systems) to get their input.

Get Up And Goe Got Up And Went
After nearly 50 years, Pantone decided it was time for a change, and it did so with some fanfare, by launching a brand new color matching system, called Goe (and pronounced “go”). But what was the impetus for this launch?

Giovanni Marra said, “Over the years we have added colors, because designers always want more colors to choose from. The [swatch]books turned into a haphazard arrangement of colors, because we would always add new colors onto back of the book. It was easier because of mathematical numbering, but not intuitive. In 2007, were looking at how to upgrade the system, and integrate the features people were asking for. After a lot of research, we came out with Goe. It was laid out scientifically, in chromatic arrangement, with easy steps between colors, making it easy to find colors and work through the book,” Marra explained.

The Goe system yielded 2,058 colors, a system that could work alongside the original PMS, as well as features intended as benefits for printers. The Goe system uses 10 base inks instead of PMS’ traditional 14, which was less total inks, but still a completely new set of inks for printers to purchase. These new base inks allow for an expanded color gamut, and Marra explained Pantone’s intentions in using the new base inks: “With Goe we tried to make the system more easily printed,” he said, “because some colors can shift if they are coated certain ways. Most printers know how to get around these issues, but we wanted to fix them. We had to change some of the ink bases to deal with these coating issues.” For both designers and printers, employing the Goe system meant adapting to an entirely new numbering system as well, a huge change from the nearly-sacred numbering system of the traditional PMS. This change wasn’t received very well.

Why Goe Didn’t Take Off
Goe was launched with good intentions, but didn’t yield the results Pantone hoped for. “It never took off the way we thought it would,” Marra mentioned, “because people are very comfortable using the PMS system, and in general were very resistant to changing.” Right off the bat, the Pantone marketing was confusing. From the designers’ side, it wasn’t clear how Goe would relate to its older brother, the storied PMS. Was Goe meant to replace PMS? Or could the two be used in conjunction? The new numbering system and similar-but-not-identical colors just raised more questions. This put off many designers who were either annoyed or confused. Why mess with a tried-and-true system that seemed to work fine?

Printers were also not thrilled with elements of the system. Todd Mason, from Elk Grove Graphics, explained, “To date I am not aware of any jobs at our shop that specified using a Goe Pantone color. It really has been a flop because it requires printers to stock ten additional mixing colors. These colors are only slightly different in color to the original PMS system.” Marra is well aware of such sentiments: “There was resistance from printers because they had to inventory new ink bases, and they would sometimes be resistant to changing their workflows even when designers spec’ed the new Goe colors.”

Also, Marra said that international branding projects suffered too. Because of a lack of awareness of Goe overseas, design firms were hesitant to specify Goe colors that would need to be printed outside of the US and Canada, for fear that they would be sacrificing crucial color matching needed for important branding projects. In short, if your designs don’t include legacy PMS brand colors and your final products are printed stateside, you can use Goe spot colors comfortably and exclusively. And there are some colors unique to the Goe system, which can be a competitive branding advantage—though it’s not easy to figure out which colors those are.

Packaged To Goe
Despite all of these strikes against the Goe system, this isn’t the occasion for a eulogy. Pantone continues to support the product line, thanks in part to the packaging industry. This design niche has embraced Goe moreso than others—mainly because all the Goe colors can be coated without color shifting. “The packaging industry picked up Goe very well because if the similarity to flexo, being easier to reproduce because all colors are the same ink thickness, making it easy to run the jobs,” Marra said.

Our Review of The Goe Products
In the rear view mirror, it’s obvious that Goe wasn’t the success that Pantone hoped for. It might not be an ideal tool for specifying color, but you might still find the system useful in some ways. Here’s what we thought of the Goe swatchbooks and system overall. [Full disclosure: Pantone provided Hexanine with a set of Goe swatchbooks for review.]

With the Goe swatchbooks themselves, the new color arrangement isn’t a big problem, but it would have been more helpful to see which colors are similar to existing PMS colors. As it stands, there is no easy way to compare similar PMS & Plus colors to Goe, except to view the books side-by-side. Some kind of subtle notation, conversion tool, or documentation would make it much easier to use. However, Goe has made one excellent technical contribution to the line, in the form of the “Color Checker Light Indicator” at the back of the swatchbooks. The checker is a set of 2 colors that look identical in corrected, neutral “daylight”, but color shift apart if viewed under poor lighting conditions that will affect color viewing. This is especially helpful for designers with color-sensitive clients who like to look at proofs and pieces in fluorescent or incandescent lighting conditions.

The Goe system also lets you download the color libraries and myPANTONE palettes for use in the Adobe Creative Suite apps and QuarkXPress. Installation of the libraries is simple enough, just requiring a self-installing download that adds the new Goe palettes to your design apps, without even needing to restart the applications.

The myPANTONE palettes creator is a standalone app for generating color palettes. This application is clearly meant to be a value-add for the Pantone set, but it seems like an unnecessary inclusion. Almost any creative professional worth their salt already has a way of creating palettes that typically revolves around their current applications. Why would you need another application to complicate your workflow? There are also other, more-useful applications like Adobe’s Kuler which has now worked itself into the native Creative Suite applications. Overall, Goe has some interesting characteristics, but nothing that would cause us to abandon PMS and years of experience using the old Pantone system. In that respect, Goe was a failure, though it might have some life in it as a niche product. Pantone seems to think so, and time will tell.

The Future Of Goe
Goe isn’t going anywhere right now, Marra explained. “Goe is still gaining in popularity, and combining the systems, you have a greater range of colors,” he said. “Our experience is that once people get over the hump of trying it, they generally like it. We are still supporting Goe, even though it’s not going to be significant in the market. But there are people who like it, and so we are still supporting it.” To that end, Pantone has also lowered the prices to help speed adoption. “Designers and printers were comfortable with the Pantone Matching System,” he said, reiterating reasons for the birth of Goe. “But we knew we needed to add more colors into the range that people would use. Designers were still wanting more colors.” These insights led directly into the creation of the brand-new Pantone Plus system, which we’ll discuss in our next installment. Stay tuned!

We’d love to here from those of you who’ve had experiences with the Pantone Goe system, so please tell us your stories in the comments below. Thanks!

We gain at least as much inspiration and encouragement from the work of our students as they receive from our instruction, so we’d like to pass it along by showcasing some of their impressive student projects. Periodically, we’ll highlight great work coming out of our classrooms on this blog.

Last quarter in Tim’s Brand Standards Manuals class at Chicago Portfolio School, Allison Chod chose to redesign the identity for the Tic Tac brand. In addition to building an identity system around her new mark, she also created packaging concepts and a brand book to guide usage of the new rollout.

Allison’s work was selected as one of four winners in the Best Of Quarter competition. Congratulations, Allison.

As the recent Tropicana packaging redesign fiasco shows, our perceptions of the products we choose are often made up of much more than the items themselves. But where do these brand perceptions come from, and how are they made? If designers are brand anthropologists, as Erin recently touched on, then consumers should be considered explorers, traversing shelf and window in search of that perfect bottle of tea or pair of shoes. And as in person-to-person interaction, in the branding world, first impressions are everything.

Marketers long ago realized the power of Saturday morning cartoons and used that time-slot to introduce countless children to a myriad of toys and snacks. Wide-eyed Children of the ’80s first learned about Fruit Wrinkles through claymation and the simple line: “Hi, my name is Roland, and these are Fruit Wrinkles.” It was fun, it was simple and it worked, and millions of globs of fruit flavored snacks graced the lunchboxes of a generation. Great brand strategists realize that at any given moment, someone, somewhere is experiencing their product for the first time, whether it’s in front of the TV, browsing the internet, or rolling their cart down the supermarket aisle. We call that process it Brand Discovery.

Brand discovery is sometimes used as an business-to-business term to describe an internal creative audit, but we think it has a much more powerful (and useful) meaning. Brand Discovery is strolling into the gas station to buy a Monster Energy Drink and noticing a can of Rockstar for the first time. It’s seeing a commercial for E-harmony while staring at your empty Match.com inbox. Or it’s glimpsing a Tom’s Shoes billboard around town and Googling the website when you get home. These and infinite more first contact experiences place the individual in the role of consumer-explorer, and being handed something on a platter is never as fulfilling as coming across it yourself.

Being handed something on a platter is never as fulfilling as coming across it yourself.

Sometimes entire marketing campaigns are based around the concept of Brand Discovery. Millions of drivers recently stuck in traffic spotted giant billboards with the words “WHO IS SALT”, only later to realize that they were seeing advertising for the latest Angelina Jolie thriller. Using mystery to reward consumer-explorers and create a buzz isn’t a new tactic (especially here in Hollywood), but it’s frequently turned to precisely because it works. At some level, all of us feel a sense of accomplishment when reach a summit and solve that mystery.

Established brands have also found a way to get involved. Generic products, once ridiculed, have been transforming en masse to more polished “Private Label” brands. Private Label sales hit a record high in 2009, and accounted for 90 percent of all gains in supermarkets. Target’s Archer Farm line of products are continuously being discovered by a regular clientele, and even Pharmacy giant Rite Aid is now getting in on the action. Eschewing Private Label offerings, some brands seek consumer-explorers through the use of variety. Remember when there were only two kinds of Cheerios? We don’t either.

With the constant barrage of new products hitting the marketplace each year, it’s becoming more and more difficult to connect with individual consumers. The tools we use to get the job done as brand strategists may change, but the experience stays the same. Exploring is exciting. Discovering is even better.

Photo illustration created using a photo by Anthony Albright, used under Creative Commons license.

Our copy of LogoLounge: Master Library, Volume 2: 3000 Animal and Mythology Logos has arrived! Ever a great source of inspiration, research, and insight, this new volume includes our work for Ocean Dawn, an upscale set of oceanfront luxury suites. Thanks to Rockport, Bill Gardner, Catharine Fishel, and the whole LogoLounge team for our inclusion, and for putting out such a great resource.

What’s brand gap? It’s taking a walk through Macy’s and missing Marshall Field’s. It’s trying to find something quickly at Babies “R” Us. It’s staying at a Westin and having a dirty pillow case. A brand’s identity must culminate at the level where the user experiences the product or service. If this fails, then all of our work in design and branding and marketing is for nothing.

Brand Gap can more formally be defined as the distance between what you say the brand is and what the customer says it is, and, it can be bridged. Marty Neumeier has talked a lot about this. The brand must be honest, must be firm in the foundation of the promise and must link with the customer’s reality, if it is to be traversed.

The very best, most talented designers must be committed to communicating the brand experience through the work, and equally so, must commit to helping their clients understand what the brand is perceived to be. We are brand anthropologists of consumer culture, always working to effectively align brand perspectives between business and consumer.

And, that would have been a lot to share over lunch.

We’re covering a very familiar topic — the design process. We went back and forth answering each other’s questions, describing the process for our last project at Hexanine, a logo for BevReview. Think of it as the teaser before the big reveal of the final design. Brigid and I each took turns asking the other questions, and responding in turn. Read on to find out what our process was and what we learned along the way.

Can you explain the brief for this project?

Chris: BevReview is a beverage blog ran by Steve Tanner. His blog discusses everything from taste and nutrition facts, to the packaging of the drinks. All of the BevReview posts focus on non-alcoholic beverages. Brigid and I took on the task to create a logo that shows BevReview as a fun and credible resource in the beverage industry. The goal was to give BevReview a logo that will stay true to it’s brand.

Would you like to talk about what kind or research we did for the project?

Brigid: I researched the company, industry, and their competitors to find out who they are and their target audience. From our initial meeting with BevReview, I was handed the task of focusing on the concept of rating. So, I began by writing words that could be used to describe or symbolize rating, such as, checks, thumbs up and down, scale, arrows, ranking using bottles or caps, etc.

What was the concept you worked on and what steps did you take?

Chris: Based on our meeting with BevReview, I began sketches on a bottle that was fluid and organic in style. I started by looking at a lot of old bottle forms and drew many iterations of bubbles and bottles together. I drew upon the old glass bottles for inspiration. A lot of combinations were created as I started emphasizing the contour of the bottle. Further along the way, I began incorporating a check mark to emphasize BevReview’s rating. We then showed Tim the sketches and of took the rating concept further. Based off of our sketches, we started working with a bottle and meshing it with a “thumbs up” to enforce the idea of a rating or approval.

What are your thoughts on how the sketching went for our thumb and bottle concept?

Brigid: I began sketching based on the words created during mind mapping, rating, thumbs up/down, checks, etc. And like Chris said, we decided on pursuing the sketch that incorporated a thumbs up with the shape of the bottle. So, we began with numerous sketches and then narrowed in on this one execution. With this execution in mind we then went on to the computer with more iterations.

Walk us through your process on developing the logo further once you took it to the computer.

Chris: For the computer iterations, I focused on how the bottle/thumb mark would look incorporated with various typefaces. I searched for typefaces that reflected BevReview’s brand characteristics. I also focused on how we could make the mark look more like a bottle and not just a hand. The infusion of shadowing was involved. The goal was to make the thumb fully integrated within the curves of the bottle. The typeface chosen had to compliment the style and curvature of the bottle as well.

Could you walk us through the color exploration for the logo and what you did to take the logo to the next level?

Brigid: Once I brought the logo into the computer, I focused first on getting the shape down first and then moved on to the color. For the colors, I looked at ones that were bright and appeared tasty. An important role for the variation of colors was used in creating the highlights, shadows, and midtones. So, by using large chunks of colors, I could create dimension and separation of the liquid within the bottle, as you can below in some of my many logo variations.. I believe this technique helped create a more finished look.

To sum it up, what have you learned from this process that’s new or maybe familiar, but valuable to know?

Chris: One of the great things I learned was the importance of exploration. Brigid and I both pushed ourselves through this process in concept and in technique. We could have stopped after one round of sketches, but we wouldn’t have been able to develop the ideas that we took to completion. From our sketches to putting our designs to the computer, multiple variations were explored. Fonts, colors and scale were looked at with a critical eye. Many things are to be considered. Was it memorable, scalable, and authentic? We stressed the importance of making a logo that would stand on it’s own against other competitors.

Note: The final BevReview logo will be showing up here on the blog soon.

It’s been hyped as “magic”, “revolutionary” and the potential salvation of the publishing industry. A little thing called the iPad. Yes, it’s beautifully designed by Jonathan Ive. Yes, it’s simple to use. But why do people seem more willing to pay for news, magazines, and content when it’s delivered as an iPad app, when the same basic content has been on the boring, old Internet for years?

Audiences’ lack of willingness to pay for Web content is one of the main stakes through the heart of the newspaper and magazine industries. So, the question is, what’s the secret of the iPad? Is the power of the Apple brand so great that it can save dying content-creators, by turning once-worthless content into gold? Is this little device so amazingly groundbreaking that it will transform content buying habits? It’s tough to say this early in the device life cycle, but our crack investigative team has cooked up some answers to those very questions.

So, for your consideration, here are seven reasons why iPad-delivered content seems more valuable than its Web counterpart:

Reason #1: iCool Is Contagious
Anything related to Apple becomes more desirable by association. Apple has evolved from a computing platform into a purveyor of coolness. It has been so successful in coupling content curation (iTunes songs, movies, AppleTV) and hardware (iPhone, iPod, iPad) that Apple’s brand cache is soaring. Thus, any content sold and distributed by the “Big Apple” automatically becomes more valuable and desired.

Reason #2: We Want Safety More Than Openness
For all the talk about Web Standards, the Open Source movement, and the rise of DIY culture, it seems like many users still prefer consistency over freedom. Could it be that people are more interested in having a consistent, predictable presentation – something the multiplatform, cross-browser world couldn’t offer? If users are willing to give up an ample measure of freedom, Apple seems to be a decent argument that a tightly controlled, closed platform helps ensure better user experiences.

Reason #3: Buying Is The American Way
Another significant factor involved is the purchasing emotions involved. Buying an app seems to feel more concrete and permanent than subscribing to website content. Websites evolve, change, and even disappear, but an app stays on your tablet. And buying an app is a much simpler, more straightforward process, with a single seller, a single account to keep track of. Apple has made the purchase experience so easy, consistent and trustworthy (through years of iTunes and iPhone experience) that users now trust it implicitly. Apple customers are rewarding that trust by tapping the “Buy” button often.

Reason #4: On The Road Again
Portability (different than what you’d get with netbooks or smaller laptops) is such a huge deal that people are wiling to pay for the convenience of doing things while lounging on the couch. It’s the ideal piece of hardware for reading on a plane, in the backseat of your car, or sitting in bed. Steve Jobs won’t ever come out and mention it, but being able to surf the web discreetly in the bathroom is a significant feature.

Reason #5: Pay A Little Bit Forward
Micropayments might have been a little bit ahead of their time, because people are more open to paying small amounts for apps and subsequent publications. With a “recession-be-damned” attitude, app sales are gigantic. Apparently this category of impulse purchases feel better than committing to ongoing website content subscriptions.

Reason #6: New Is Good
Repackaging the same content was all that the content industries needed. Put a beautiful, new aluminum-and-OS wrapper around your same stories, photos, and images–and voila! New look, and same great taste, while reaching a previously-distant audience.

Reason #7: Content Wants To Be Paid
Content doesn’t actually want to be free. Instead, people are realizing that great stories/photos/content are worth paying for, worth subsidizing and supporting. For some reason, Apple has helped us see the innate value in the terabytes of professional content available out there, and has convinced people that high-quality paid content beats crowdsourcing any day. We can only hope.

Image mashup courtesy of Flickr Creative Common licenses from Rego and mandiberg.

“In order to cement your status in the cultural elite, you want to be already sick of everything no one else has even heard of.”
—David Brooks, NY Times Op Ed columnist

This has, in my ten years of experience, been the prevailing attitude and general temperment in business, amidst a set of people who are constantly standing on the forefront of culture and gleaning bits for their work. I might be bold enough to say that attitude will soon be falling out of fashion. In a post-Obama victory, in an empathy-filled set of hard luck headlines, it’s time for optimism and promise to make a comeback. What can we offer in hope? Are our uncertain times a clarion call for a newer, more hopeful way of thinking and presenting real problem-solving solutions?

Now, I’m not talking about an unrealistic cheeriness that merely sugar coats the struggles ahead, but a bright-eyed, soul-driven willingness to seek and find solutions to problems—both for our world, and for the business that drives it. In these times, this kind of buoyancy is a breath of fresh air, a much-needed emotive undertone communicated to a weary audience. Are these the kinds of concepts and solutions that will resonate with clients and their markets in the coming months and years? I’m convinced that working within this mental framework will change us for the better.

One great example is Banyan Tree Hotels and Resorts. They’ve achieved success on the two fronts of corporate responsibility and corporate growth of a high-end luxury brand. In its latest CSR initiative, the Banyan Tree Al Wadi in the United Arab Emirates released a first set of animals, consisting of 18 Arabian gazelles, eight Reem gazelles and four Arabian oryx into the resort’s 60-hectare nature reserve. Other ongoing CSR projects include Seedlings, a group-wide initiative to support communities by building capacities of young people; Greening Communities, to tackle climate change; Resource Conservation, to reduce energy and water consumption by each resort; and a marine lab at the Banyan Tree Vabbinfaru in the Maldives to look into environmental conservation. And, the Banyan Tree group has been supporting Earth Day for five consecutive years.

Founder Ho Kwon Ping attributes the company’s success to excellence in brand building and says idealism and business are not incompatible. “To me, the proudest thing I’ve done (with) Banyan Tree has nothing to do with hotels; it’s the fact that we’ve been able to build, from a relatively small platform, a globally sustainable brand that would have come from Asia, but be able to compete globally.”

There doesn’t have to be a difference between a good businessperson and someone who wants to improve the world. We must act on what matters. Making a difference is what intrigues and moves us forward. There is this rising expectation that business must address our most pressing concerns. Businesses will succeed based on their innovation of purpose, not on selling more products or creating better models for how they handle their business.

Photograph of the small jetty of Banyan Tree, Vabbinfaru by Daniel Laskowski, used with permission.

Some of our work was included in the 2009-2010 Snapshot publication, seen below. Can’t wait for next year!

UPDATE: You can now see the Snapshot in all its glory as a PDF, courtesy of AIGA Chicago.

“Creating a brand is about trust.” “Branding is who you are, and marketing is what you say to different audiences.”

And finally,

“An organization’s visual language organically comes out of the brand story.”