Color has a huge impact on me. I’m pretty certain that I am a tetrachromat. I often find myself mixing interesting colors in my head. I even associate people with certain colors.

Needless to say, Pantone® is a part of my everyday life – both professionally and personally. Pantone’s tagline, “The color of ideas,” is a personal favorite of mine because I hold it and the idea behind it to be true on so many levels. As the world’s foremost authority on color, Pantone has a tremendous amount of control and influence over design and ideas.

Thus, as a tribute to Pantone, I have compiled this list:

Top Ten Pantone® Inspired Products

10. Pantone Cell Phones
9. Pantone Stairs
8. Manetone
7. Pantime
6. Pantone Coffee Mugs
5. MyCuppa Mugs
4. Colorstology
3. Pantone Fashion Color Reports
2. Rubitone
1. Pantone Color Calendar

10. Pantone Cell Phones

Japanese cell phone manufacturer Softbank has created a line of cell phones in 24 Pantone swatches. The specs are nothing special, but they sure are pretty!

Source: http://mb.softbank.jp/mb/en/product/3g/812sh/

9. Pantone Stairs

Featured in French Elle Decoration, this is a colorful, inexpensive, and expressive way to decorate your stairs.

Source: http://www.elle.fr/elle/deco/guide-shopping/tous-les-guides-shopping/detournement-pour-tout-changer/pantone/(gid)/700465

8. Manetone

Artist Tim Fraser recreated Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère using over 5,000 old Pantone paint chips.

Source: http://www.timfraserbrown.co.uk/

7. Pantime

Developed by student designer James Beattie of Bedford College, UK, Pantime is a timepiece based on the color wheel and Pantone swatches.

Source: http://swissmiss.typepad.com/weblog/2008/10/pantime.html

6. Pantone Coffee Mugs

Caffeine and creativity often go hand-in-hand. What better way to start your day than with your own Pantone swatch-inspired mug? Unfortunately, they are not available in every Pantone swatch, but they are available in two sets: the original and 2008.

Source: http://www.w2products.com/products.builder/pantone.html

5. MyCuppa Mugs

I like these better than the ones above. Because with these, you can turn drinking your coffee or tea into a game of matching hues:

Source: http://www.suck.uk.com/product.php?rangeID=76&showBar=1

4. Colorstrology

I don’t take much in astrology or astrology-related disciplines. However, Colorstrology is a fun Flash site that takes your birthday and gives you a short description of your personality and birthday Pantone swatch. Here is a screenshot of my birthday:

Source: http://www.colorstrology.com/

3. Pantone Fashion Color Reports

Every spring and fall, Pantone releases the Fashion Color Report to coincide with the runway shows. I am no fashionista, but I like to peruse the downloadable PDF for upcoming trends and predictions in fashion. After all, fashion has a way of seeping into general design trends as well. (As a side note, I’m not too crazy about the Spring 2009 colors…what do you think?)

Source: http://www.pantone.com/Pages/Pantone/Pantone.aspx?pg=20619&ca=4

2. Rubitone

I let out an audible gasp when I saw this last week. I just love it when designers/marketers take tried and true concepts to repackage them in fresh and clever ways!

Source: http://ignaciopilotto.wordpress.com/2008/10/26/rubitone-concept/

1. Pantone Color Calendar

I had featured the Pantone Color Calendar on my blog before and I still love it just as much as the day I first saw it. The new 2009 calendar is available on Amazon for $29.95.

I couldn’t find any good pictures of the insides of the 2009 calendar, so these 2008 ones will have to suffice:

Sources: http://www.amazon.com/Moritz-Zwimpfer-Colour-Calendar-2009/dp/3721206584 and http://www.aisleone.net/2007/design/colour-calendar-2008/

One of my favorite blogs, ColourLovers, posted an entry today titled “The Colors of Global Brand Identities.” As a self-confessed color freak, I naturally found the post utterly titillating and delightful.

Some of the color palettes were immediately recognizable:

If someone had blocked the titles of the above and asked me to name the brand associated with each palette, I would’ve been able to answer immediately.

Others were not so obvious, and I must admit that I was disappointed with myself to not be able to recognize them at first glace:

I was especially bummed to not recognize this instantly:

How many times do I access Google’s main page and use its applications every day? Heck I go to their office so much that people are starting to think I work there. Bad Jenny!

Seeing all these colors in their various hues and shades evoke different brands and images, I wondered to myself: can colors represent people too?

I believe the answer is yes.

For example, I always associate the color baby blue with my friend Jun, because he once went through a phase where he only bought clothes and apparel in that particular shade. For my birthday one year, he bought me a pink hat, scarf, & glove set – he then immediately pulled out the same thing in baby blue, proudly declaring, “Look! We can match!” Personally I think he only bought me the pink set so he’d have an excuse to buy the baby blue one. 

I associate the brown shade of a potato with J, because he’s obsessed with potatoes and Mr Potatohead toys. In addition, one of my favorite sweaters of his is that exact color, and when I picture him, he’s usually wearing that sweater. Brown may seem like a bland, neutral color but that particular shade is very friendly, approachable, fun, and laid-back…just like him!

As for myself, I think of myself as a gray. Not any particular shade of gray, but just gray in general. At first gray evokes a boring feeling. However, I believe that the color gray has the ability to change the most drastically via the addition of other colors. Think about it – there are grays with strong tones of yellow, green, blue, etc. There are cool grays and warm grays. At first glace, simple and a bit boring, but upon further investigation, complex and highly volatile, and sometimes a bit harsh…yep, that’s me.

I associate my mother with deep purple for her proper and impeccable manners. My sister is a sparkly magenta for her full and vibrant personality. My friend Elyse is a pale pink for her beautifully soft voice and femininity. Jessica is a champagne gold for her bubbly and outgoing personality. I can go on and on.

Do you associate a color with yourself or your loved ones?

If you are at all familiar with design, printing, and/or publications, you should be aware of Pantone and its Pantone Matching System (PMS). (Pantone touts itself as the “global authority on color” and its PMS is the professional standard for design industries.)

And, as we all know, I’m a color freak.

So imagine my delight when I saw the 2008 Pantone Calendar featured in Black*Eiffel. Created by Swiss designer Moritz Zwimpfer, this desktop calendar features a different PMS color every day, with plenty of space below for appointments, notes, or doodles.

I also love that the pages are spiral-bound, which makes for easier writing.

The Pantone Calendar is available on Amazon for $28.

…or so I think.

I had written before that I have a gift of seeing color. I always saw colors others couldn’t…but I just brushed it off as one of those weird, quirky things about me.

Now I’ve discovered that there may be a scientific explanation: I may be a tetrachromat. A what-a-mat? A genetic mutation that allows some women (sorry guys, girls only) to see 100 million colors as opposed to the normal 1 million.

Here is the full article from Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Some women may see 100 million colors, thanks to their genes

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

By Mark Roth, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Susan Hogan can’t be sure, but it wouldn’t surprise her if she turned out to be a tetrachromat.

A tetrachromat is a woman who can see four distinct ranges of color, instead of the three that most of us live with.

A genetic test would be needed to verify whether Mrs. Hogan truly fits that description, but it could help explain why the interior decorator can hold up three samples of beige wall paint, “and I can see gold in one and gray in another and green in another, but my clients can’t tell the difference.”

It may be impossible for us trichromats to imagine what a four-color world would look like. But mathematics alone suggests the difference would be astounding, said Jay Neitz, a renowned color vision researcher at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Each of the three standard color-detecting cones in the retina – blue, green and red — can pick up about 100 different gradations of color, Dr. Neitz estimated. But the brain can combine those variations exponentially, he said, so that the average person can distinguish about 1 million different hues.

A true tetrachromat has another type of cone in between the red and green — somewhere in the orange range — and its 100 shades theoretically would allow her to see 100 million different colors.

That may be why Mrs. Hogan can look out the windows of her Mount Washington home and tell the relative depths and silting of the three rivers at the Point by discerning the subtle differences in their shades.

“I have a very hard time even giving names to colors because I see so many other colors inside them,” she said.

Dr. Neitz, who conducts his research with his wife Maureen, said only women have the potential for super color vision.

That’s because the genes for the pigments in green and red cones lie on the X chromosome, and only women have two X chromosomes, creating the opportunity for one type of red cone to be activated on one X chromosome and the other type of red cone on the other one. In a few cases, women may have two distinct green cones on either X chromosome.

But it’s unlikely, Dr. Neitz said, that all of the women with four types of color cones will have the potential for superior color vision, because for many, their two red cones will be so close to each other in the wavelengths they detect that they won’t see things much differently than a three-color person does.

He estimated that 2 percent to 3 percent of the world’s women may have the kind of fourth cone that lies smack between the standard red and green cones, which could give them a colossal range.

Finding tetrachromats through genetic screening is one thing. Proving they can see tens of millions of additional colors is another.

One research group that believes it has identified a true tetrachromat is headed by Gabriele Jordan of Newcastle University in Great Britain.

Dr. Jordan started by working backward from certain “color blind” boys to their mothers.

About 8 percent of the world’s men have color deficiency, which is the term vision researchers prefer to color blindness.

Most of them inherit two red or two green cones along with the standard blue cone, making it impossible for them to distinguish between red and green peppers, or tell how well-done a steak is, or pick out matching clothes.

Dr. Jordan’s team used vision tests to identify more than a hundred schoolboys in the Newcastle area with that kind of color deficiency.

She knew that the mothers of those boys would have either two red or two green cones, and she is now in the process of testing those women to see which of them might be “strong tetrachromats,” as she put it.

To single out such women, she came up with a clever test. Each woman looks into an optical device that shows her three tiny discs in rapid succession. Two of the discs are a pure orange wavelength and the third is a nearly identical mixture of red and green. The women aren’t told which is which.

Dr. Jordan reasoned that women with two distinct red cones would see the red-green disc differently than the orange discs.

Of the 20 women she has tested so far, only one was able to instantly and accurately identify the red-green disc each time. She is now conducting genetic tests on the woman’s saliva to verify whether she has the genes for distinct red cones.

Dr. Jordan said that the woman, who has not yet been identified, is a physician near Newcastle.

For a doctor, she speculated, super color vision might give her the ability to tell whether a patient is ill just by noticing subtle changes in skin tone that a normal doctor wouldn’t see.

Based on Dr. Neitz’s estimates, there could be 99 million women in the world with true four-color vision.

But before they pat themselves on the back for their superior evolution, he said, it’s important to note that humans are just getting back to where birds, amphibians and reptiles have been for eons.

Those creatures have long had four-color vision, but a key difference is that their fourth type of color detector is in the high-frequency ultraviolet range, beyond where humans can see.

In fact, that finding allowed scientists to figure out recently why the males of some species of birds did not appear to have brighter plumage than the females, Dr. Neitz said.

The problem was in the observers, not the birds, he said. When those species were viewed through ultraviolet detectors, the males had markedly different feathers than the females.

In a similar way, he said, our eyes aren’t capable of seeing the world the way a true four-color viewer perceives it, and so we have no way of knowing how many advantages that might give to the tetrachromats.

“There are many things in the world that are physically different from one another that you can’t tell apart now” with three-color vision, he said, but a four-color woman presumably would see the distinctions.

And sometimes the edge may just be aesthetic.

Which could be why, when Susan Hogan’s husband puts a new piece of fruit in their fruit bowl, “I have to rearrange it so the colors go together right,” she said with a laugh.

First published on September 13, 2006 at 12:00 am

Mark Roth can be reached at mroth@post-gazette.com or at 412-263-1130.

Although this is pretty cool, I don’t think I’ll get my DNA tested. Who knows what other weird things they’ll find out about me?

When I was little I believed that some people were better at drawing because they had better motor skills. In reality, it has more to do with perception and brain functions: the ability to differentiate space, light, and shadows. Steady hands are a plus, but they are not required.

An old art teacher once told me that I had a rare gift of seeing color. She said that I was better at differentiating and mixing color than some of her former colleagues, who were professional color mixers. (Yes, this profession existed before the advent of computers.)

Now although I may not use this gift in every day life (dressing, makeup, etc), I often find myself staring at an interesting color and mixing it in my head. And I’ve given up describing colors as “cool purple with a hint of prussian blue.” Instead, I’ll save myself the blank stares and just say “purple.”

I can also tell when colors look “cheap.” For example, you can look like you shop at designer stores by wearing “rich” colors. Basically, ”rich” colors are often mixed with expensive pigments and are more difficult to reproduce, as so many different colors went into mixing them.

Space and depth perception, light and shadows, color. It makes me wonder, do I see things differently from other people? For example, if Rembrandt woke up in his neighbor’s body one day, would he have seen the world differently? More blurred? Less vibrant? Maybe even a little skewed?

I should borrow someone’s eyes and brain one day. Now that’s a morbid thought.