Color Standard Options: Pantone and Scotdic

Color Standard Options: Pantone and Scotdic

Preface: If you’re a small company and sticking with basic colors just ask your manufacturer to show you several samples of the color you need and then just pick one. Ask for a yard and convert this to your color standard.

Here’s how it usually happens. The bright creative right brained designer discovers that one of the shiny pennies in his pocket makes the PERFECT color for his latest design. Mind you, not just any penny and certainly not a new penny but only this particular one. Since you can’t divide the penny and send it to your factory, QC department, Merchandiser, etc you need an alternative.

Enter
1. Pantone http://www.pantone.com/pages/products/replacement_pages.aspx and
2. Scotdic http://www.scotdic.com/html/color_systems/CottonSystem.html These are two color systems that sell chips or swatches of color standards.
3. If you clicked on the links for Pantone and Scotdic you should have picked up that these color systems can be overwhelming.
4. I found Pantone more widely available and used internationally
5. Personally, I preferred Scotdic for fabric color standards. Wal-Mart used to specify Scotdic standards but I don’t know if they still do.

6. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE Send a physical color chip or item (the actual penny sample is OK) to your factory. Never rely on Pantone numbers alone. It’s too confusing. Paper folks use one series of Pantone numbers, plastic folks use another series and cotton fabric folks use yet another one and on and on.

It’s been my experience that only lazy and weak managers refuse to provide physical standards because this gives them an out if they don’t like the color dips the factory sends them.

All for now and please let me know if you have any specific requests.

Sincerely,
The Underwear Maven
http://www.keylargounderwear.com/servlet/StoreFront