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A creation of Lawrence Herbert in the mid-1950s, 1,114 colors were generated by mixing 12 base pigments in specified proportions. The advertising and design industries had come to demand design consistency, and each color was assigned a number. Kodak standardized its yellow packaging with PMS 1235. Coca Cola likes to say its formulae are secret, the red of its branding as well as the ingredients of its sweetened drink – but the red is PMS 485, or close enough.¹⁹¹

With the widespread adoption of four-color offset printing in the second half of the twentieth century, the CMYK system was created, where tiny dots of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black, almost invisible without a magnifying glass, are overprinted in different sizes, depending on the contribution each needed to create the composite color effect. Black is added to the three colors, because although in theory the three colors when overprinted solid should produce black, it is never black enough. Not all colors in the PMS pigment mixing system can be represented in CMYK, and for this reason inks generated by mixing pigments are placed side by side with CMYK renderings in the PMS swatches. They are noticeably different.

With the coming of analogue color television, for the first time humans begin reading images from light sources that use additive color processes. Using continuous voltage signals to modulate color on a phosphorescent screen, these have an infinite number of intensities. Quality has not yet been transposed into quantity. Digital screens, however, have a fixed and numbered range of intensities, moving us radically into a world where properties are ubiquitously transposed between quality and quantity.

This is how the additive process of a digital screen works. Each pixel (a picture element) is a combination of three juxtaposed subpixels: red, green, and blue. These are not normally visible separately, but they become fused as a color given the limited affordances of our vision. When rendered with 24-bit encoding, the industry standard since 2005, each subpixel can be projected with an intensity of 0 to 255: zero when it is turned off; 255 when it is as bright as it can be. The effect of all three RGB subpixels at brightness 255 is to create a white pixel; at zero a black one. This means that 256³ or 16,777,216 color variations are possible.

If the human eye can only distinguish about 10 million colors for the practical purposes of everyday seeing, there is no point in going further than 24-bit encoding.

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¹⁹¹ Roberta Schultz Santos, 2014, “Pantone: Identity Formation through Colours,” Master of Arts in Contemporary Art, Design and New Media Art, OCAD University, Toronto, Canada, pp. 23–25, 29.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 148-149. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Pantone Matching and Digitized Color §MS1.3.1e