As a long time publisher I already knew that Pantone originally became the printing industry standard because it enabled printers to print the exact ink colour specified no matter where in the world they were located. From ink the ease of matching colours exactly spread outward to paint to clothing to ... to the colours on the monitor you are looking at right now.
Here's a snippit from Wiki that explains it:
"
The Pantone Color Matching System is largely a standardized color reproduction system. By standardizing the colors, different manufacturers in different locations can all refer to the Pantone system to make sure colors match without direct contact with one another.
One such use is standardizing colors in the
CMYK process. The CMYK process is a method of printing color by using four inks—cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. A majority of the world's printed material is produced using the CMYK process, and there is a special subset of Pantone colors that can be reproduced using CMYK .[SUP][
citation needed][/SUP] Those that are possible to simulate through the CMYK process are labeled as such within the company's guides.
However, most of the Pantone system's 1,114
spot colors cannot be simulated with CMYK but with 13 base pigments (15 including white and black) mixed in specified amounts.[SUP]
[6][/SUP]
The Pantone system also allows for many special colors to be produced, such as metallics and fluorescents. While most of the Pantone system colors are beyond the printed CMYK gamut, it was only in 2001 that Pantone began providing translations of their existing system with screen-based colors. (Screen-based colors use the
RGB color model—red, green, blue—system to create various colors.)[SUP]
[7][/SUP] The Goe system has RGB and
LAB values with each color.[SUP]
[8]"[/SUP]
2014 is going to be HouseDragon's Favorite Colour Year! *LOL* 