Once the colour bible of the designer and the printer, the Pantone® swatch books were merely an expensive but indispensable tool for doing a job, to choose colours, to specify colours to assess colours, the use colours accurately. Before anything so clever as digital printing, before computers and the internet, these little, chunky, multi-coloured floppy fans held a special place in the daily lives of people who made stuff. You walked in to see a client and used it as tool to help people understand colour, at a printers you used them to ensure consistency, they were a good looking bit of serious, workmanlike equipment. Then something changed.
We all knew they were cool, we loved the aesthetic of them, those little squares of colour, white space and text, all perfectly designed, methodical and sweet to the eye. Then ‘things’ started to appear wearing the Pantone® trade dress in a cheeky way, a post modern wink to those in the know. Now, initially this was a stroke of pure genius. Some bright spark, no doubt a designer had taken the magical leap of taking a trade tool and applying it to an object other than the tool. Doesn’t sound like a clever thing to do, but it was. Suddenly this object (and I don’t know what it was – probably a cup) embodied all the knowing cool of the tool and imbued an ordinary object with a whiff of the designers art. A plain old ceramic mug was turned into an in joke for any designer. To begin with you saw them sparingly, like a rare bird or an exotic car they caught your attention and you felt good for being in the know, understanding the joke. Then it changed again.
Within a short period this inside joke, the funny little colour book with it’s simple and elegant layout and it’s accompanying brand name was everywhere and on everything. Firstly proliferated by the endless ‘too cool for school’ Alessi® pushing, minimally stocked but plumply priced designer shops, they stocked Pantone® mugs in a rainbow of colours – a colour for any one of your tasteful friends in the know. Then the mugs, sensing that there was a bigger world out there made the leap from the rarefied waters of the boutique designer retailer to the mainstream, high-street retailer. The bread like rats, if cups can do such a thing. Everywhere from department stores and card shops to gadget shops and TKMaxx suddenly had them. BUT… this was merely the beginning.
Since the branded cup made the beachhead and set up base camp it has been followed by an endless invasion of Pantone® branded merchandise that, one product after the other, reaffirms it’s banality, waters down it’s brand drop by drop to the point where, it now has the ultimate non designer, designer brand in it’s sights, the gold standard for valueless branding, the king of them all Pierre Cardin. Pierre Cardin (a very talented French fashion designer and astute businessman) learnt a long time ago that you can take a cheap, nasty chinese pen and transform it before the buying public’s eyes into a magical and mythical device, full to the brim of style and panache by banging a name on it. He did it with pens, umbrellas, wallets, watches, bags, car interiors, perfume, bras and furniture; but Pantone® are on a mission.
A quick google image search for ‘Pantone® Products‘ brings back images of such a wide, endless range of artless and hearltelssly branded merch that mr Cardin must be shaking his fists and damning them for doing things he hadn’t even dreamt of. From light switch covers to ladies purses to christmas decorations to soft furnishings, you can have them all, and you can have them in any colour as long as it’s one of theirs.