You’ve looked through your Pantone book for the perfect color, and think you’ve found it. It’s Pantone 478, a warm brown. But it’s a little too dark. And the next color, 479, is way too light. You could ask the printer to mix the two inks, but that’s risky—you know that projects will be printed in different shops, in different cities, on different presses and output devices. You’re also thinking ahead to electronic applications. So you continue your hunt in other parts of the book, adding torn-out chips to the drifts of little colored rectangles littering your desk. You know from experience that it won’t be easy to get an exact CMYK match of the ink that’s printed as a spot color on the letterhead. And how it will look in RGB on everyone’s monitors is anybody’s guess.

This whole scenario could be a thing of the past.

Pantone, Inc. has developed a new system intended to revolutionize the way we choose colors and work with them.

“We asked best-in-class designers all over the country what they would like in a new system,” said Doris Brown, Pantone’s vice president of marketing, at a recent meeting at the company’s Carlstadt, New Jersey, headquarters. “All of them said they wanted a significant number of new colors and a relevant, efficient, intuitive manner of working with them, which they could use confidently and globally across print and electronic media. Our answer is the Goe System.”

Four years in the making, the Goe System was launched at Graph Expo in Chicago on September 5 and became available for purchase on October 1. It has 2,058 chromatically arranged new colors and several new products for choosing and specifying them, including large, peel-and-stick chips, palette cards on which to experiment with them and a software package that integrates with design software. “We’re providing on-screen tools to help you create color palettes and share and communicate them,” added Brian Rooney, Pantone’s chief technology officer. “Goe is the single point of control for color.”

Pantone characterizes itself as a color communication and technology company that develops and manufactures products for design communities. Its 200 people are enmeshed in the meanings, moods and messages of color and in color combinations and trends. For example, as an answer to the question, “What does Goe mean?” Ellen Pinto, Pantone’s director of public relations, offered: “It’s an emotive way of calling to action. Goe explore. Goe express. Goe engage.”

There are lots of things to engage with, including software that lets you play with colors in many different ways. And seeing the guide pages laid out side-by-side—it’s 43 feet of color, from yellows to oranges, reds, purples, blues, greens—can be inspirational. There are new colors like soft gray-blues and taupes that promise to get creative juices flowing.

The Goe system consists of a fan guide; a two-volume set of books with adhesive-backed chips and 2 “Palette Playgrounds;” 30 palette cards for presentations and permanent records; and a CD with software that serves most applications that use a color palette. The fan guide is called the pantone GoeGuide, and has 294 leaves with 7 colors per page. Each color is identified by its number, its ink-mixing formula, and its RGB value. Four dots indicate whether it is reproducible in CMYK (only 50 percent of colors are). The two chip books, titled pantone GoeSticks^TM, have six 13/16" × 1 3/16" adhesive-backed chips per color. The Palette Playgrounds allow designers to place, remove and replace chips when experimenting with color combinations.

The software, called myPANTONE Palettes, offers designers several ways to make color selections: using known RGB or HTML color values; with a circle gradient color-picker; or directly from the Goe System and the PANTONE Matching System palettes. It also includes a Color Schemes component that gives users a range of color harmonies, such as analogous and split complementary; an ImagePalette Builder that generates up to twelve colors present in an imported image and lets the user manipulate them; and myPalettes, a screen version of the plastic playground, for making drag-and-drop selections. Palettes can be saved, e-mailed to clients and communicated via mypantone.com, which Pantone envisions as an online creative community for sharing color information and trends. “Members will also have special access to trend and forecast palettes created by industry professionals,” said Brown, while running through a demo on her laptop.

Because they’re an integral part of thousands of identities and projects, the 1,114 existing PANTONE Matching System (PMS) colors are not being phased out. With the addition of the Goe System, the number of printing ink formulas is now 3,172. Printers will be mixing Goe colors from nine new bases and a clear extender, rather than the fourteen PMS bases and transparent white they’ve used since 1963. The engineering and numbering is new, as well the look and feel. As explained by Ken Niepokoy, vice president of manufacturing and color technology, the original pantone Formula Guide was organized around “centerline colors,” a series of basic colors printed in the color bar in the center of each page of the guide. Going up a page, a centerline color was lightened by adding transparent white in three increasing amounts and darkened, going down, with three increments of black. Over the years, as new colors were added, the numbering system was also updated. That’s why greens, for example, can be found in the 300, 500 and 7,400 ranges.

The Goe System is based on 165 “unique key colors,” each made by mixing, full-strength, 2 of the 9 new bases. Each key color is at the bottom of the page (or leaf), and is lightened by adding six small increments of clear extender and darkened with six increments of black. “A color family may extend over several pages,” Niepokoy emphasized. The numbers are now in three parts, say, 5-1-1 instead of 511. The numeral 5 stands for fifth color family (a yellow), 1 for the page number within the series, and 1, the top position on the page.

“Although this is a spot-color-based system for offset lithography, Goe has been designed for a digital world,” said technology officer Rooney. In the years since the PMS was developed, Pantone’s constituency has expanded to include software companies and makers of monitors and output devices. Rooney’s team has been partnering with manufacturers in order to, among other things, incorporate the full digital color gamut and ensure the integration of the Goe library into future software updates.

In addition to Pantone’s in-house ink technologists, color scientists and manufacturing and marketing people, a number of consulting and design firms worked on the project. The initial research and engineering was done by IDEO, the Palo Alto-based consulting firm that works in areas including electronic equipment and consumer experience. A project team from IDEO’s Evanston, Illinois, office, visited designers’ workplaces to gather data. “We studied the many ways all kinds of people think about and use color, evaluated Pantone’s existing system, and delivered prototypes demonstrating the structure and elements of the new system,” said Peter Ehling, senior project manager, in a telephone interview. “We looked at all the things Pantone could do to make an impact and create value for designers. We saw that there was a world of color that designers wanted to use that fell outside the colors that could currently be mixed for offset lithography, and that the system needed a new range of pigments as well as a natural color space in which to navigate.”

The final execution of the retail product, the naming, copy lines, branding, package design and advertising was done by G2 Worldwide, a unit of the Grey Group, which developed the “chip as starting point for creative journeys” brand identity for Pantone, Inc. in 2006. The Goe design team was headed by Pablo Pineda, a partner in G2’s New York office.

For more than a year, print designers, Web creators and designers at brand identity and Web design firms tested various ideations of the execution. For example, Heather Kilduff, a color marketing specialist at Sterlite, a Massachusetts maker of plastic storage products, evaluated the palette playground prototypes. John Defrancesco, a New York design consultant who produces print promotions for associations and nonprofits, gave feedback on the color range, chromatic order and numbering system. His input: “Designers don’t care about the numbers, they care about the number of colors,” he said. “I wanted to make sure they offered a larger range of colors, more in-between shades, and that there would be better control over the end product; that colors we pick would be communicable no matter where and how the piece is printed.”

All formula guides and chips distributed worldwide are printed at Pantone’s New Jersey headquarters—in what must be one of the world’s cleanest pressrooms. There, they have a one-of-a-kind, 35-color KBA Rapida press that runs 28 separate inks, which are dispensed drop-by-drop and blended according to strict manufacturing standards. The Goe pages are printed on brighter white stock than previously: a number-one-grade, 100 lb. coated text sheet. Uncoated and matte versions are in the works.

One of the designer’s continuing challenges has been matching Pantone colors in CMYK, which leads to questions about what this system offers in that respect. The short answer is that there will always be a limitation in what a screened combination of dots can do to approximate a solid ink. “CMYK is a device space, what a device can produce,” warned Niepokoy. “And the colorspace is a fraction of the size of RGB.” He steered the conversation to the growing importance of RGB: “Do you have a calibrated monitor? That’s really key, and the new software will take you through how to do it.” ca

Editor’s note: On August 23, 2007, X-Rite Inc., a publicly held Michigan technology company that specializes in color managing and matching products, agreed to buy Pantone Inc. for $180 million. The acquisition is currently taking place and will not affect Pantone products and services, including the Goe System.