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What is Pantone and PMS?

Services: Law Firm Website Design . SEO . Internet Marketing . Law Firm Marketing Guide . Content Marketing . PPC

 

Video Translation

Hi, I’m Jillian Brunette. I’m the creative director of PaperStreet and we’re here today to talk about what is Pantone and PMS. Pantone/PMS is the same thing basically. What we get questions from our clients on about is, first of all, “What does this mean and how this is actually applied when I’m going to be using my logo or my brand?” When we design logos, we first use Adobe Illustrator. We’re working online to select all of these colors. We’re really not concerned with the Pantone color at this point. What we want is for our clients to love how the logo looks online as they see it through our presentations and as it will be on their website.

When they approve that and they’re happy with the color online as they would use it even on PowerPoint presentations or again their newsletters or websites, then we move on to selecting a Pantone color that will be used for their print materials. So there’s three different papers essentially that you can use and there’s uncoated and coated and matte as well. Uncoated papers are used for letter head, envelopes, business cards, your stationary essentially. And coated papers are more for printed brochures that have a glossy finish.

Sometimes, depending on your brand and your personality style, you can use a matte paper. So there’s these process books that we use to pick the colors. This is our uncoated swatch book. We can go through all of these colors and select. Now this is a universal system, so any printer should be able to, once you select a number, match this accordingly. And the way that you can ensure that they’re doing their job is to get color proofs and just make sure that you’re happy with the way it prints out in your color proof as the way you’ve been seeing it online. Consistency is key and you want to make sure that the color looks the same on everything that you do throughout your marketing materials. However, there may be some slight variances.

I’ll get the swatches here that I have. This is the coated, this is the matte, and this is the uncoated. As you can see, because they’re actually printed on these types of papers, they do look very different. And that’s why it’s good for us to show you or have your printer show you with these actual swatches will look like. In the right light with your monitor or on any other online tools such as an iPad or an iPhone, any other devices, you want to just make sure that you like how your logo looks on there too, as well as on these swatches that you end up printing. So we pick these numbers based on what we see online and we do it visually. There is no magic formula, we would say, where you select an online color and then you just match it up through Adobe Illustrator or the system.

We have found that it is best to use, in a good lit situation, to pick these out with your eye for the best result. So the end result would be that you have a great logo that you like online that matches as well as possible to the Pantone colors that you select for your print materials, keeping in mind again that you’re going to use coated, uncoated, and matte papers. Thanks for joining us.


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One Response to What is Pantone and PMS?

  1. Scott Wright
    2:34 pm on February 29th, 2024

    Your audience would get more out of your Pantone/PMS ‘explanation’ if they weren’t still left wondering how you got from PANTONE to PMS.
    Pantone and PMS are not ‘essentially’ the same thing. They ARE the same thing.
    PMS in an acronym for Pantone Matching System.

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