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In the early 1960s, as Lawrence Herbert drove to work in a blue Cadillac with cherry red seats, he mulled over a problem: How to create a “universal language” of color. Herbert, the owner of the Pantone printing company, had just produced a retail display card that helped shoppers choose pantyhose. He had to hand-mix the subtle beiges of each swatch, because it was so difficult to buy the exact shade he wanted from an ink manufacturer. Each company defined colors differently, and when you ordered “wheat” or “taupe” or “cream,” you couldn’t predict what you’d get.
20世纪60年代早期，劳伦斯·赫伯特(Lawrence Herbert)开着有樱桃红色车座的蓝色卡迪拉克去上班时，思考了这样一个问题：怎样创造一种关于颜色的“通用语言”。赫伯特是潘通(Pantone)印刷公司的老板，该公司当时刚刚生产了一种零售颜色展示卡，帮助顾客挑选连裤袜。他不得不按照每个样本亲手调制各种略微不同的米黄色，因为很难从油墨厂买到跟他想要的一模一样的颜色。每个公司对颜色的定义都不相同，你订购“小麦色”、“灰褐色”或“奶油色”的时候，无法预测你买到的到底是什么颜色。
The solution, he realized, was to create a unified color system in which each shade was expressed as a number. “If somebody in New York wanted something printed in Tokyo, they would simply open up the book and say, ‘Give me Pantone 123,’ ” Herbert says; 123 (a daffodil yellow) would look exactly the same the world over. Herbert created a sample page to show how the system worked and sent it to ink makers. Fifty years later, he still owns a copy of that page: “I’ve got it right here in my office in Palm Beach.”
他意识到解决办法就是建立统一的色彩系统，每一种颜色都用数字来表示。“如果纽约的一个人想在东京印点什么，他们只要打开书说‘我要潘通123’就可以了，”赫伯特说。世界各地的123（水仙黄）看起来都是一模一样的。赫伯特制作了一张样页来展示如何使用这个系统，他把它寄给了油墨厂。50年后，他还留着那张样页的复印件：“它就在我棕榈滩的办公室里。”
潘通色卡第304U号
By the 1970s, Pantone was making more than a million dollars a year in licensing fees. “We had a consultant who would get a committee together and find out, for example, what colors are showing up in Milan, what colors are showing up in Paris,” he recalled. “It seems that a lot of designers all decide that coffee brown might be a good color in the same year.”
到20世纪70年代，潘通每年仅靠授权费就能获得100多万美元。“那时候我们有一个顾问，他会召集一个委员会寻找新颜色，比如米兰或巴黎新出现的颜色，”他回忆说，“似乎很多设计师在同一年都认为咖啡色很好看。”
The Pantone system spread from the advertising world to textiles to food science and has been put to some unexpected uses — like defining the color of a Ben & Jerry’s brownie. “I have matched color charts for wine,” Herbert said. “I matched color charts for anemia blood samples and for walnuts and strawberries and goldfish.”
潘通色卡系统从广告界扩展到纺织界，再到食品科学界，还被应用到了一些意想不到的地方——比如定义Ben & Jerry’s的巧克力蛋糕的颜色。“我给红酒配上了色卡，”赫伯特说，“还给贫血的血液样本、胡桃、草莓和金鱼配上了色卡。”
Now retired, Herbert still takes a proprietary interest in color — in, say, the difference between delphinium blue (16-4519 TPX) and Maui blue (16-4525 TCX). “God created the world in seven days,” he says. “And on the eighth day, he called Pantone to put color into it.”
赫伯特现在退休了，但是依然对颜色很感兴趣——比如飞燕草蓝(16-4519 TPX)和毛伊岛蓝(16-4525 TCX)的区别。“上帝用7天的时间创造了世界，”他说，“在第8天，他让潘通给世界填上了颜色。”
HEIR COLOR
与潘通继承人的对话
Lisa Herbert, the daughter of Lawrence Herbert, is Pantone’s vice president of consumer licensing.
劳伦斯·赫伯特的女儿丽莎·赫伯特(Lisa Herbert)是潘通的客户授权部的副总裁。
What’s your earliest memory of your father’s business? When I was 6, I would go to the office with my dad and play with piles of cosmetics. My dad was matching colors for clients like Revlon and Max Factor.
你对父亲的生意最早的记忆是什么？我6岁的时候，经常和爸爸一起去办公室，玩一堆堆的化妆品。爸爸当时在给露华浓和蜜丝佛陀等化妆品配色卡。
Pantone has recently gone into the business of “cool-hunting.” Yes, design-conscious industries want to know the colors for the next season. So people have begun to look to Pantone for that.
潘通最近开始了“时尚追踪”的业务。是的，对设计要求很高的行业想知道下一季的流行色。所以人们开始向潘通求助。
Pantone declared emerald green as the color for 2013. How did you come up with that forecast? We travel the world and shop the trade shows and look at awards shows and what’s coming down the runway. We also track the sales of our swatches to designers — so we know about the popularity of the colors.
潘通宣布翡翠绿是2013年的流行色。你们是怎么做出这样的预测的？我们周游世界，参观贸易展览会，关注颁奖典礼以及秀台上的新时装。我们还追踪销售给设计师的色卡的情况，这样我们就能知道哪些颜色将会流行。
What’s the most unusual use of the Pantone system? Calvin Klein kept a Pantone chip in the kitchen to signal to his chef what color he wanted his coffee to be.
潘通色卡最不寻常的应用是在哪个方面？卡尔文·克莱恩(Calvin Klein)在厨房里放了一个潘通色条，提示大厨他想要什么颜色的咖啡。
本文最初发表于2013年2月24日。
翻译：王艳
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