Pantone Started in 1963 When a Printer Got Tired of Mixing Colors by Eye

M & J Levine Advertising hired Lawrence Herbert in 1956 to manage its small ink-mixing department in northern New Jersey. The shop sold custom inks to commercial printers, and the work was a mess. Designers specified colors by name — a 'rich navy,' a 'soft tomato' — and printers mixed by eye. Two batches of the same job rarely matched. Herbert, who had a part-time chemistry background, started keeping written recipes for each ink and selling them to customers as a system rather than a service.

In 1962, he bought the company outright. In 1963, he launched the Pantone Matching System, a fan deck of 500 numbered colors, each with a fixed pigment formula reproducible at any compliant print shop in the world. A designer could specify 'PMS 185' on a brief and know that the printer in Tokyo and the printer in Manchester would mix the same red. The system standardized a workflow that, until then, had run on trust and arguments.

Pantone the company grew quickly through the 1970s and 1980s, branching into textile, plastics, and digital workflows. Herbert sold the company to X-Rite in 2007 for $180 million; X-Rite was acquired by Danaher in 2012; the brand sits there now.

In 1999, Pantone began publishing an annual Color of the Year — a single PMS number selected by an internal committee from analyzing visual culture, retail, art, and politics. The first was Cerulean (PMS 15-4020). The program turned a printing-industry reference into a commercial cycle: the chosen color appears on couches, lipstick, wedding invitations, and product packaging within months. The system that began so two printers could agree on a navy now tells the world what next year's beige will be.