Pantone CMYK Guide

New CMYK Guide Offers More Colors, New Unique Identification, Better Printing Consistency

Pantone is excited to offer its newly refreshed CMYK Guide, a must-have for designers working in digital, print, and packaging. First, the guide is bursting with additional colors – 2,868 to be exact. That’s a whopping 700 more colors than our Pantone Matching System (PMS) Guides. More colors mean more choices and more chances for design inspiration.

The new CMYK Guide also offers more of what designers have asked for in the past, namely additional in-between colors. These are colors between two existing Pantone Colors that help fill in the gaps and provide more unique offerings. These colors are all achievable with CMYK process printing so they are not as bright and saturated as the colors in the Pantone Formula Guide, but the number of choices is larger.

Speaking of unique colors, our refreshed CMYK Guide also makes it easier than ever to identify colors that do not have a close PMS equivalent. Since colors in our guide have an asterisk to denote that they have a PMS equivalent, any colors without an asterisk, i.e., without a close PMS match, are unique to the CMYK Guide.

Why is this important? Well, for smaller branding campaigns produced on digital presses, or where more expensive spot color processes are not required, unique CMYK options are a great way to find fresh, less exposed colors for use in a company’s brand identity, packaging, or materials. Just think of it – the Pantone CMYK Guide offers an incredible 1,889 coated and 1,653 uncoated unique colors that have no Pantone Spot Color equivalent less than 2.0 Delta E.

Another key feature of our new guides is that – like our recently relaunched Pantone Color Bridge Guide – the new CMYK Guides are produced to exacting G7 specifications. G7 specs ensure that the CMYK colors identified in your design process can be reproduced more consistently in real world printing conditions. You can now design with greater confidence, knowing that the CMYK colors you choose are achievable on most any press.

This is especially true for customers in the Americas and Asia where G7 standards prevail. Even for our European customers, where FOGRA is the esteemed standard, our new CMYK Guides will still yield better results and guidance for designers seeking to convey a creative color concept.

As technical color processes continue to improve, rest assured that Pantone and its parent companies, X-Rite and Danaher, continue to improve their technical capacities to ensure the best color reproduction possible.

So check out our new Pantone CMYK Guide to add more color choices to your palettes, to find more unique colors for your brands, and to achieve more consistent results wherever you print in CMYK.