Graphic Design 101: Week 8 - Color Explained!

A brief intro to the world of Graphic Design with your Instructor Shannon McNamara!

May 23, 2025

Pantone, Spot, RGB, and CYMK - oh my!

Learn what will work best for what you are designing!

Table of Contents:

Pantone
Spot
Process
RGB
Color Relationships
Color, Branding, and Your Design Career
Assignment

Pantone Color of the Year - 2025

The History of Pantone

Pantone: The Global Language of Color

Pantone provides a universal language of color that empowers brands and manufacturers to make color-critical decisions throughout every workflow stage. From design to production, Pantone ensures consistency and accuracy across materials and processes.

Pantone Standards include both digital and physical tools for precise color specification and management. The Pantone Color Institute™ offers customized color standards, brand identity consulting, and trend forecasting, featuring highlights like the Pantone Color of the Year, Fashion Runway Color Trend Reports, and insights into color psychology. Through B2B licensing, Pantone integrates its color system into various products and services, enabling partners to reproduce approved Pantone values and boost efficiency. Meanwhile, Pantone Lifestyle extends the brand’s design influence into apparel, home décor, and accessories.

Since 1963, when Pantone introduced the revolutionary PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM®, the company has been a pioneer in color standardization. This system organizes colors using a proprietary numbering format and chip system, which has become an iconic part of the brand. Today, Pantone supports color-conscious industries including textiles, fashion, beauty, interiors, architecture, and industrial design, offering more than 10,000 color standards across materials like print, textiles, plastics, pigments, and coatings.

Pantone Standards are available in both digital and physical formats, and integrated workflow tools like PantoneLIVE and Pantone Studio ensure accurate, achievable, and market-relevant color as technology continues to evolve the design process.

Spot versus Process Color

Spot Colors

Colors created without screens or dots, such as those found in the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM®, are referred to in the industry as spot or solid colors. From a palette of 18 basic colors, each of the spot colors in the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM is mixed according to its own unique ink mixing formula developed by Pantone. You probably mixed yellow and blue paint to get green in your youth. Creating a PANTONE Spot Color is similar in concept, but with the added need for precision.

Each color in the System has a unique name or number followed by either a C or U. The letter suffix refers to the paper stock on which it is printed: C for Coated paper and U for Uncoated paper. Also created without screens, PANTONE metallic and pastel colors are considered part of the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM.

Due to the gamut of the 18 basic colors, some spot colors will be cleaner and brighter than if they were created in the four-color process described in the next slide. Spot colors are commonly used in corporate logos and identity programs, and in one, two or three-color jobs.

Process Colors

The most common method of achieving color in printing is referred to as CMYK, four–color process, 4/c process or even just process. To reproduce a color image, a file is separated into four different colors: Cyan (C), Magenta (M), Yellow (Y) and Black (K).

During separation, screen tints comprised of small dots are applied at different angles to each of the four colors. The screened separations are then transferred to four different printing plates, one for each color, and run on a printing press with one color overprinting the next. The composite image fools the naked eye with the illusion of continuous tone.

Process colors are represented as percentages of cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Varying the percentages offers thousands of color possibilities. When four-color process printing is used to reproduce photographs, decorative elements such as borders and graphics can be created out of process colors. This helps to avoid the added expense of an extra plate needed to print each spot color.

RGB Colors

RGB stands for Red, Green, and Blue. These are the three primary colors of light. When you mix them in different amounts, you can create millions of other colors. Screens on phones, TVs, and computers all use RGB to show images and videos.

Each color (Red, Green, and Blue) has a value between 0 and 255. If a color is set to 0, it means none of that color is used. If it’s set to 255, that color is at its brightest. For example, (255, 0, 0) means the color red is fully on, but green and blue are off—so you get bright red. (0, 0, 0) is black, and (255, 255, 255) is white.

By changing the mix, you get different colors. Want yellow? Mix red and green at full brightness: (255, 255, 0). Want a soft blue? Try something like (100, 100, 255). RGB is the language of color for anything digital!

Converting Spot to Process

Oftentimes, a spot PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM Color is requested when creating a process-printed piece. To save money, the spot color should be evaluated to see how it will look if printed in CMYK. While some colors can be simulated well, there are many that are outside the possible color gamut for that process and will look quite different. As the quality of the resulting color conversion is very subjective, the designer can make decisions using the PANTONE COLOR BRIDGE® guide, as well as a PANTONE EXTENDED GAMUT Coated Guide.

Most Adobe programs can convert Spot to Process right within the program.

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Pantone Color Picker

https://www.pantone.com/color-finder

A note on how Pantone and Adobe work together as of 2022:

On 12 April 2022, Adobe announced: “Pantone color libraries currently preloaded in Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, will be phased out starting August 31, 2022.” “Pantone is supporting their most up-to-date color libraries exclusively through the Pantone Connect plug-in”.
Marcie Foster, director of brand management and marketing communication at PANTONE, told Printweek that both companies “have been and continue to be long-standing partners.” The reason for the removal, Foster stressed, is the outdated implementation of the PANTONE library in Adobe apps, causing many newer colors to be missing.

Pantone Connect Plug In Pricing

Color Relationships

Complementary Colors

Complementary colors are pairs of colors which, when combined, cancel each other out. This means that when combined, they produce a grayscale color like white or black.^[1] When placed next to each other, they create the strongest contrast for those particular two colors. Due to this striking color clash, the term opposite colors is often considered more appropriate than "complementary colors".

Split Complementary Colors

The split-complementary color scheme is a variation of the complementary color scheme. In addition to the base color, it uses the two colors adjacent to its complement. This color scheme has the same strong visual contrast as the complementary color scheme, but has less tension. The split-complementary color scheme is often a good choice for beginners, because it is difficult to mess up.

Triadic Colors

A triadic color scheme uses colors that are evenly spaced around the color wheel. Triadic color harmonies tend to be quite vibrant, even if you use pale or unsaturated versions of your hues. To use a triadic harmony successfully, the colors should be carefully balanced - let one color dominate and use the two others for accent.

Analogous Colors

Analogous color schemes use colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. They usually match well and create serene and comfortable designs. Analogous color schemes are often found in nature and are harmonious and pleasing to the eye. Make sure you have enough contrast when choosing an analogous color scheme. Choose one color to dominate, a second to support. The third color is used (along with black, white or gray) as an accent.