Let’s ‘spot colour’ in Stoke

If you’ve been slightly bewildered as to what we’ve been up to for the last few weeks, don’t worry. We’re here to explain what’s going on!

We think that Stoke-on-Trent (and Newcastle-under-Lyme) often get painted in a bit of a negative manner and yet we think there are a lot of colourful aspects to the place we are situated within and wanted to raise some awareness of their artistry and charm.

Staffordshire’s “official” nickname is the Creative County, which can be seen on some pretty prominent road signs as you approach the area. This is especially true in the north of the county, due to the creativity expressed through the world-famous ceramics industry based in Stoke-on-Trent, also known as the Potteries.

Pantone Colour Systems are well known within the design and print world, but the whole thing may be a bit of a mystery to those not in “the know”, so we wanted to shed a bit of light for you... Pantone LLC is a company that invented a universal colour language, to be used where colour accuracy is deemed essential, for instance, critical in keeping colour consistency when building a brand. By choosing a specific colour from a clearly referenced Pantone swatch, brand owners & designers for the first time could have confidence knowing their printers could understand and achieve the colour imagined.

The way that Pantone achieves consistency in colour is using ready-mixed inks to produce ‘spot colours’ prior to printing. Each of the Pantone postcards shows a different spot colour and its unique code. This is distinct from standard printing, which uses ‘process colours’, that are made up by mixing four inks - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (CMYK) (The letter 'K' is used because it's the last letter of the word "Black" and is not occupied by any other colour), during the print process.

Many of the brands we know well use specific pantone colours to ensure consistency with their logo.

Colour plays a massive part of our everyday life when working in the Design and Creative industries, and hopefully now we’ve given you a little bit of context to some of our recent posts. We hope you’ll be able to enjoy them even more!

We would love for you to get involved by sharing with us the colour and beauty that you see around Stoke-on-Trent and Newcastle-under-Lyme using #coloursofstoke, and please share this blog post and our photos too!