Color Me Happy

I travel over 200 days a year and spend plenty of time camped out in hotel rooms, lobbies, airport lounges and restaurants planning and presenting talks to designers, printers and paper distributors. I often talk about protocols and standards—measuring attributes in order to achieve and deliver perfection. You can imagine that it’s hard to delight a road warrior like me, but every once in while I discover a place that is enticing enough to make me want to pack my bags and beat a path to their door. And so it is with a newly launched “hotel of colors” by our friends at Pantone.

The Pantone Hotel^TM, located in Brussels, Belgium, was designed by Michel Penneman and Olivier Hannaert. Using an all-white backdrop, the hotel has strategically placed saturated color palettes in each room, and on each floor, to put color at center stage. Rooms speak to each guest’s palette preference—not to mention their imagination. This plan allows guests to choose distinctive hues which meet their emotional needs as well as their visual and style preferences upon check-in. Hate red? Blue is not soothing? Don’t worry, at this “Goldilocks” hotel you can find a room that is just right—at least color-wise.

Which leads me to an important work question: how do you find, communicate and deliver the exact color you want? Turns out, there are a number of systems that help those us of in the printing business work color reproduction magic. Pantone is a well-known, longstanding partner. Recently (6/2014), I posted an article on this website Defining and Communication Color: The CIELAB System. In it you can learn more about objective color definition standards, exacting numeric measurements and universal color protocol.

Maybe you can download the article in an orange room at The Pantone Hotel^TM—all while traveling in a colorific world.