It will also be seen as a supplier of ancillary software and applications for handling colour profiling to work with its colour measurement systems. It will also be seen as the owner of the colour specification and selection company, Pantone.
Few people in this industry will know of the leading position that X-Rite holds in the paint, textile, automotive and plastics industries to ensure accurate colour is achieved. What most people don’t see is that X-Rite’s company strategy is to be the colour company straddling a range of industries in being the predominant supplier of applications, technologies and tools to ensure consistent, accurate colour across any material or media. In this it is moving from being a colour measurement company to becoming the colour appearance company. In this I see X-Rite as being the world leader in colour measurement, selection, transmission and appearance, and above I see them as “The Colour Company.”
I recently had the opportunity to moderate and speak at a dinner event hosted by Arena International’s Pace team on the subject of critical brand colours in packaging to a range of executives from some of the major consumer and business brands. The keynote presentation at this event was given by X-Rite/Pantone covering the developments they were taking as they turn additional focus to brand colour management.
I have written about X-Rite a number of times before, specifically about their Colour Exchange Format (CxF), and their acquisition of Pantone. It was very interesting therefore to assess how much has happened within the organisation since Pantone came into the company. Since that time X-Rite has gone through a major restructuring of both its financial structure, as well as internal restructuring in incorporating Pantone within the company. Pantone however is still operated as a separate division of X-Rite,
X-Rite, a $200 million company, is perhaps best known within the graphic arts markets as the leading supplier of colour measurement and management technologies, but the company has a far wider focus today than solely colour measurement. X-Rite is the world’s leading company in colour selection and specification, colour transmission, colour measurement and calibration across a wide range of industries – colour communication, if you will, in today’s digital graphic arts workflows. In addition to graphic arts, X-Rite is a leader in other colour-critical markets such as the paint, plastics, automotive and textile industries. While it has competitors in all these markets, there is no competitive organisation that operates across all these markets – a significant advantage for X-Rite/Pantone and its customers.
X-Rite and Pantone are helping lead the transition to digital colour communication; while the company maintains that physical standards will always be necessary for visual evaluation, increasingly companies for whom colour decisions are mission-critical can benefit from digital communication of colour data – a transfer that is less subjective, and that maintains faithful intent of the original colour choice. In addition to this is the company is expanding its colour services business to work with major brand owners in implementing accurate brand colour presentations on a worldwide basis. It already provides such a service to a number of the world’s leading brands.
Pantone is the leading colour specification application within the design and creative communities. While the Pantone Matching System, and the new Pantone Plus Series systems are very successful, they do have limitations. PMS is a solution that allows for visual colour selection from a printed Fandeck or from colour patches within software applications such as Adobe Creative Suite. There are however many colours that cannot be reproduced from CMYK printing.
The Fandeck swatches are also substrate dependant and thus do not accurately represent how a colour will appear on a different substrate. The Pantone Fandecks are produced on a specially modified press and are created through physical mixing of three of fourteen primary colours plus black. The conversion of these colours into CMYK therefore does have some limitations. The company is however bringing interesting new tools to market that allow designers and prepress professionals to verify whether or not a colour is within a press’ gamut even before you get to proofing, allowing for better colour choices to be made at the front end of the process. ColourMunki Design, and the new Pantone Colour Manager (featured in the new i1Publish) allow designers and imaging professionals to check whether a colour is “PrintSafe” in advance.
One of the keys for converting to a completely digital workflow is the previously mentioned Colour Exchange Format. CxF is an XML-based open file format that holds far more information about colour and its presentation than any other way of representing colour. Because X-Rite has made this an open format it can easily be incorporated into other suppliers systems. CxF is the power behind X-Rite’s colour services operations for working with major brand owners.
When the applications and devices in a workflow speak and accept CxF data, it opens the door for unambiguous colour communication across all the players in the production value chain. The X-Rite plan however is to widen the scope of CxF to handle far more than just accurate colour data. The plans for it will be to extend the format to handle details such as substrates, reflection, gloss, opacity, lighting and surface effects – otherwise known in the industry as appearance data. CxF is currently in release at Version 3. X-Rite is also working with the International Standards Organisation in the hopes that CxF will be adopted as an ISO standard for colour and appearance metadata communication.
The X-Rite/Pantone strategy in making colour specification and usage a full digital process is ultimately moving beyond merely the use of CxF into creating databases of all critical colour (and eventually, appearance) data for any industry that requires accurate representation of colours in whichever way they need to be used anywhere in the world. It sounds like a lofty goal, but the technology is not far off. X-Rite’s strategy however is not just in developing digital colour standards; it is also introducing new and enhanced colour measurement and specification devices. The latest of these, and one that opens up new business areas is CapSure. This hand held device for the textile, paint and interior design markets for capturing both the texture and colour of materials. It has also recently launched the latest NetProfiler application using its XRGA data standard that is an Internet based application to align colour measurement devices to all produce a consistent result.
I recently had the opportunity to discuss with certain key X-Rite executives and technology specialists some of the ongoing development work being done to further extend X-Rite/Pantone’s role in colour-critical markets. Some of these are next generation versions of existing products. X-Rite is about to launch its new suite of i1 Solutions, featuring the next-generation i1Publish software, which replaces its legacy i1Match, ProfileMaker and MonacoProfiler solutions. X-Rite is also working with key partners to help make colour management easier for office applications, a subject I plan to cover more in the future when X-Rite announces more about this. There are also many other interesting developments under way as it works to enhance its overall offerings in all of its markets. This is why I firmly believe that X-Rite is “The Colour Company”.
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