The Pantone Goe System, A Beautiful Box With Lots of Colours

Design & Looks

With more than 2,000 new PANTONE Colors, the PANTONE Goe System has been designed to inspire creativity and fulfil the requirements of the printing industry as well as web designers. PANTONE Goe is more than a single product with exciting new colors; the System includes modern tools and interactive software to drive collaboration and improve versatility in an increasingly global, multimedia environment.

That’s what Pantone says. Some others who know what they’re talking about, say Pantone has it all wrong with this new Goe System. For example, the colour chips read “RGB”, but should read “sRGB”. The expert Eddy Hagen of Flanders measured the chips and found a huge difference in colour rendition between the chip’s colour and the same colour in the Adobe RGB colour space.

Performance

Painful as that may be to expert users, the real pain comes from designers who apparently don’t know the first thing about colour management. Read the totally devoid of any criticism piece on Duoh’s site. I look forward to see their pieces of coloured art, relying on what Pantone claims.

Still, the box --Pantone calls it a “Museum Box"-- looks right to me. It’s plastic, but sturdy. It has been made in China, so it has all the credentials (actually, one of Pantone’s VPs told me they had to refuse a complete shipment because of bad quality). If you don’t use the Goe System itself anymore, you can always use the box for storage. But there are good things to say about it, too. If you keep in the back of your head that it’s sRGB and not RGB, the 2,058 new colors in the PANTONE Goe System are arranged in an intuitive, chromatic order. The PANTONE Goe System includes the PANTONE GoeGuide and PANTONE GoeSticks, a two-volume set of adhesive-backed chips, along with intelligent but not-working-right-on-Mac-OS-X software for creating colour palettes that can be imported into applications, shared among coworkers and clients, and archived for future reference.

User Friendliness

The PANTONE Goe System offers a significantly expanded colour palette, yet is based on a smaller set of 10 PANTONE Mixing Bases, plus PANTONE Clear, that are readily available anywhere in the world. This ensures colour consistency on a global basis while keeping ink inventory to a minimum for printers. I’ll protect you from Pantone’s further marketing babble about their colour and inks expertise....