How To Find Your Pantone Colour Codes Before Production.

John Mayer

It was John Mayer who famously said “Life is like a box of crayons.” Or was that Forest Gump? Either way he had a point. You just never know what is going to come next, and us artist, creative, illustrators, designers and just about anyone else who works with colour, would agree! The thing is, colour is literally infinite, the human eyes are just simply not strong enough instruments to see them all! There are claims that the human eye can see between seven million and one hundred million colours, either way it’s a lot, and it’s nice to know there’s a system out there we can all agree on when deciding on which colours to use and how they translate on screen, into print or other physical merchandise such as custom enamel pin badges, woven and embroidered patches, bespoke medals, commemorative coins, business cards and other products that require accurate colour matching. If you do not use any software, and prefer to sketch all your ideas, we will happily find the Pantone codes for you, accuracy is about 99% if not more (basically the human eye would struggle to pick out that 1%).

Pantone Colour Codes

Pantone colours put simply, are ‘Pantone’ codes that refer to specific shades of colours identified by Pantone, it enables designers to accurately determine their desired colours with 100% accuracy. It’s a kind of language if you will, which enable us to all work cohesively and in sync.

Let’s find your Pantone Colour Codes using Illustrator!

For those of you who use Illustrator, you will be relived to know that finding your Pantone colour code is very straight forward. Let’s get straight to it.

1. Open your design in Illustrator, it will most likely be in CMYK format so we will work form there. Here we have our Studio Dais logo, and we want to find out the Pantone reference of that rather lovely blue.

2. Select the colour you would like to convert to Pantone. We have used CMD-A to light select the shape away from the text. Now go to EDIT > EDIT COLOURS > RECOLOUR ARTWORK.

3. Upon clicking RECOLOUR ARTWORK, you will be presented with the following box, click on LIMITS THE COLOUR GROUP TO COLOURS IN A SWATCH LIBRARY. This basically opens up all the available colour books in Illustrator.

4. You will see the Pantone colour books to the top and you’ll want to choose PANTONES + SOLID COATED. Click OK, it will now transform your selected colour into PMS (Pantone matching system).

5. Open the SWATCH panel and double click the highlighted colour to find out your Pantone reference colour like so.

And now you have your Pantone colour code to make sure your finished designs are accurately manufactured without problems. Cool eh!?

When you send in your design to us, you can then give us all the corresponding codes for each colour. We do offer this as part of our service, but isn’t it better to learn some new skills as well as have reassurance that you have got control over your precious designs. We always send you a design proof which will have all the important specifications like Pantone colour codes, dimensions, any extra options like back stamping, glow in the dark, glitter or number code stamping etc.

If you would like to get your own custom enamel pins, patches, coins, medals, jewellery items  made by us then head over to our Custom Products Section. 

Or contact us and ask about anything design or manufacturing related!