on 28 September 2007So Pantone has launched a brand new colour system. Frankly, it’s about time. If there’s one thing worse than having to shell out several hundred quid for a box of little books full of coloured paper, it’s knowing that the same one is going to last you through the foreseeable future. What you really need is a reason to shell out again for the same thing with different numbers on. Thanks, Pantone.
The Pantone colour system that everyone’s been using for 45 years was called PMS, because having to specify Pantone colours was something that came around every few weeks and made you feel tired and irritable. The new system is called Goe, because someone at Pantone is an idiot.
Yes, Goe. Did they look at the Nintendo Wii and think, maybe if we come up with an even more ill-advised name we’ll shift even more units? You have to wonder about the focus group that picked ‘Goe’ from the alternatives. And what were the alternatives? Other random verbs with extra vowels? At least ‘Wii’ is a play on ‘wireless’, as well as sounding like a bodily function. As with the DTP package that used to be marketed as ‘PublishIt!’, you can see what they were doing. ‘Goe’, on the other hand, is worse than mildly offensive, it’s completely impenetrable.
Is it a reference to the ancient Chinese game of Go? That does have one thing in common with the Pantone system: nobody understands it. Or is it supposed to remind us of Goa? As in, ‘Hey, man, the colours…’ Are we meant to think of the Japanese unit of volume that can be transliterated as ‘go’, when it’s not being spelled as a TV set with a pointy hat on? In the traditional measurement of foodstuffs, a go is one-thousandth of a koku. And a Pantone number can be a recipe for a cock-up… Come on, I’m trying here.
I suppose specifying Pantone colours is a bit like conjugating the verb ‘to go’. It’s one of the few suppletive verbs in English, having an etymologically unrelated inflection, the preterite ‘went’. I go, I’m going, I’ve gone, but I went. Similarly: the client specifies a colour, I’m specifying it, the printer’s specified it, but the output looks nothing bloody like it. Highly irregular? Not in my experience.
How do you even say ‘Goe’? Obviously you can’t just pronounce it ‘go’, or all the months of painstaking linguistic research that must have gone into adding the letter ‘e’ to the end would have been wasted. Some sort of pseudo-antipodean vowel mangling is surely required. Think of Kath, from Kath and Kim. ‘Look at moiye – this is the exact calluh oiye moiyne, pacifically! Now goe and print ut!’
Whatever its name means, Goe provides 2058 new colours. Well, not new colours exactly, unless there’s an option to upgrade your eyes. (Just checked. Not yet.) But colours that didn’t have a little number until now. And why do we need new colours? ‘The graphics industry has dramatically transformed itself since the introduction of the Pantone Matching System. Gone are the cut-and-paste hard copy graphics of yesteryear, replaced by the computer-driven hardware and software of today.’
These guys are certainly alive to the latest trends. It’s all so different now from when I first used a Pantone book in the early 90s. We’d design pages using QuarkXPress on our Macs, then cut them up and paste them onto a large stone. Obviously things have moved on, and Pantone is leaping ahead of the curve with its futuristic innovations.
For example, Goe colours don’t just come in overpriced swatch books. You can also get GoeSticks. Disappointingly, these aren’t luminous plastic rods that you wave around at graphic arts festivals. They’re sticky-backed chips that you arrange on palette cards to remind clients of their Pantones. It’s a nice idea, but I’d rather have GoePins: colour-coated thumbtacks that could be pressed firmly into the client’s forehead.
Simply by attaching a small mirror to the client’s telephone, one could then avoid all those conversations that begin, ‘Hello, it’s [stupid company name that our MD thought was a bit Web 2.0]. We’re getting some [type of business stationery you’d assumed we’d be commissioning from you] designed by [name of high street print shop staffed by 18-year-old NVQ Media & Communications dropouts]. Can you just remind me of the number for [that Pantone colour it took six meetings and the decimation of two chip books to agree on]? Thanks!’
I suppose it would be kinder just to order the client a coffee mug in the appropriate colour. You can buy Pantone mugs now, but there are only ten colours available, which seems a smidgen ironic. Maybe the advent of Goe will bring a larger number. In the meantime, though, it’s not really a problem. Pantone mugs? There are millions of us already out there. I’m off to order my GoeGuide.
Adam Banks dreams in colours, but he can never remember what colours when he wakes up.
adambanksdotcom They might as well call this Abu Dhabi thing The Festival Of Just Not Getting It
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