Who was the first to catalog color? Hint: it wasn’t designers!
Posted 23 Sep 2017 / 0
Pantone color book image courtesy of Allison Meier has a very illuminating short piece on where the Pantone color system came from:
Hyperallergic “The Bird-Based Color System that Eventually Became Pantone“
What I find interesting about this history is the convergent need of people in vastly different areas of science and industry to have a clear and reproducible color system. We now take for granted that there is a Pantone book that allows us to use a common vocabulary when identifying colors. But this system had to be invented — including a system for reproducing color — before we could really study color in natural and human-created environments.
A Minor Post, Art & Design, Birds, Methods, Science in Art & Design, Web