What are PMS colors?

pms

Normaly every professional in the premium and gift industry knows what PMS means: Pantone Matching System.

For those who don’t know what it means and how to use it I’ll try to explain in a few simple words what it is and how to use it.

Here is the problem at hand: How to explain to a printing company color you want them for printing your business cards or a promotional product ?

Sure, you can send them an image via email with the color, but this image will show up differently on his screen as it did on your own. In fact I work with two screens and when I display the same image on both screen colors will never be perfectly the same.

Every computer monitor is different, every printer is different. Unless your equipment is calibrated with the Pantone hue, the color depicted on your screen will not be accurate and could be many shades off.

pms
This is why the PMS, Pantone matching system was created. It’s a standard language for color identification and communication. When you say to the printer : I want you to print a pink 1767C, you can be sure he knows which colour you mean.

So it’s easy, just use a pantone guide , which contains over 1000 different colours and tell the printer the pantone code of the colour you choose.

What if you don’t have a pantone guide ? surely, any local printing company has one, and for sure you can ask them to have a look.

Click here to download a PDF file with a pantonechart.

For more information : www.pantone.com