Pantone's 2008 colors

Saturday, February 23, 2008, 11:51 PM
Website Design by John

If there is one thing you find out about yourself as a geek very early on life, it is that you are color blind. Not necessarily literally color blind (double adverb score on that sentence). But, there is a reason why Google is a white page where one guy is assigned to do one spot of color. That's just who we geeks are as people.

In the interest of making us all a little less color blind, I wanted to pitch one of the better sources for colors, the Pantone Spring and Fall Fashion colors. While I don't encourage aping anyone's color styles, I am an advocate of at least pondering what works. We as geeks reverse engineer everything else, and there is no reason to not reverse engineer color schemes, too.

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So, here are the links to the Spring 2008 and Fall 2008 fashion color schemes according to Pantone. Keep in mind, Pantone normally sells these color cards for something to the order $3,000 for a set. So, don't go sticking your nose up at some freebies.

For a sense of comparison, here are some oldies, too:

Fall 2007 (PDF)
Spring 2007 (PDF)
Fall 2006
Spring 2006

I'm still enamored of the 'Lemon Curry' color from Fall 2007.

You can find older color schemes by going into the search engines and looking for 'pantone fall yyyy' or 'pantone spring yyyy'.

You can get a lot of good color ideas out of these reports. They're all free (Pantone's fashion color reports are their big freebies for the year to build street cred). They're all backed by people who stake their living on knowing what the hell they're doing with colors.

Not all of the colors are meant to be complementary, but you can find enough guides for handling complements online anyhow. Try to extrapolate from these colors to the relationships between your basic complements and you might be able to scroea few points using color schemes in your next design.

And, yes, the Pantone colors are released more than six months before the season when they are used. Fashion is an industry. Keep that in mind.

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Thank you,
John Crawford
Pro Content and Design