This month, everyone’s favorite name in color introduced a brand new system… or as Pantone describes it, “A new vision of color.” That sounds like hyped-up marketing speak, but given a little time, it might just be a realistic assessment.

The system is called Goe, and has the ambitious job of replacing (or enhancing) the decades-old PMS spot color matching system that just about every print designer currently uses. The Goe System starts with the GoeCube—a package so beautiful that you’re tempted to buy it regardless of what it’s actually for. Is it full of spiders? Full of cupcakes? Who cares, it’s just so pretty!

The GoeCube package design is likely to help drive acceptance of the new system.

Inside the GoeCube is a fan guide (similar to the PMS fans you know and love) as well as binders with sticky chips and a “palette playground” for choosing your latest color scheme. Though most print designers will gravitate to this hands-on approach, color selection software is also included for the digital-minded, akin to Illustrator’s Color Guide and Live Color features. Additionally, this software will be a necessity until updates are available for your usual design applications.

Enough about the contents, what about the color? The Goe system contains over 2000 unique colors, dwarfing PMS’s 1100 or so. And it does it with less ink—there are just ten base colors (down from 14) in the system that are applied in a more consistent process for better matching. The expanded palette is also far better organized than PMS, with logical layout and numbering that can grow as the palette grows and changes with trends (important if it is to last as long as or longer than PMS).

According to Pantone’s article on Goe, this system is not a replacement for PMS. And I’m not sure if that is a good thing or not, or even if it’s true. Designers and printers rely on PMS and have invested a great deal of money in using this system, so it makes sense to keep it alive during a long transition period to Goe. But Goe’s features, at least as I have seen them described, sound more logical, more flexible, and more extendable.

Of course, for it to become the “new vision of color” that Pantone suggests, the catch-22 of print adoption must be overcome—printers won’t invest until designers do, and vice versa. But like Adobe’s introduction of InDesign, once some big names get to using the new system, many more printers and designers will follow. Will go be as influential as PMS? I’ll post a follow-up in a few decades.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 14th, 2007 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.