[CREATE] What color libraries do you use?

[Christoph Schäfer]

On Donnerstag, 6. Januar 2011 18:19:51 Olivier BERTEN wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I was wondering in real life graphic design what color libraries other
> than Pantone people actually use...
> 
> NCS, RAL, HKS someone?
> 
> Olivier

Salut !

It really depends on where you live/work and your area of work.

Pantone is ubiquituous, but even Pantone needed to create separate palettes 
for different purposes (e.g. printing, painting etc.).

RAL is a de-facto standard in Europe when it comes to industrial design or 
painting, but is less used in printing.

HKS is a "standard" designed exclusively for printing and wide-spread in 
Germany and some neighbouring countries.

NCS is being used in architecture, interior and industrial design. I don't 
know anyone who uses NCS for print or web design.

Focoltone, Toyo and DIC are Japanese colour libraries and, as far as I know, 
rarely used outside Japan.

Trumatch is just another way to describe CMYK process colours.

Some commercial applications, like those from Adobe, Quark and Corel also 
contain additional libraries, like ANPA (outdated) or DuPont SpectraMaster 
(CorelDraw -- maybe because some specialised print shops use them).

This is just a cursory overview, of course. I hope others will add their own 
experiences.

Cheers,

Christoph