Yesterday in class we learned about how to make true duotones, how to use the duotone Pantone books, and a little about what the new Pantone Goe system is.

Duotones
Creating duotones is really quite easy and I think having a book to reference will make it even easier. There are two duotone books that we were shown today, one for coated paper and one for uncoated. These books show a variety of black and another color duotones and the curves that are used to create the look. A lot of the duotones don’t look all that great but there were a few that I would definitely see as useful in the future.

Pantone Goe
The new color system by Pantone is called Pantone Goe. This system seems to be much more organized and forward thinking than the original Pantone color system. The numbering system has the ability to grow with the addition of colors without adding another set of numbers. This is because the Pantone Goe system uses a series of 4 values, {c}-{b}-{w} {p} = full strength color-amount of black-amount of white-paper type. Using this system, colors are able to be shown in a chromatic view all around the spectrum, from yellow back to brown-black. The Goe system also has a lot more colors available for us designers. There were 1,114 colors in the old Pantone system and there are now 2,058 colors in the Goe system, giving us even more of the variety we yearn for.

Using the new Pantone Goe system I created a duotone with a picture I took for a newsletter I am working on. The colors I used were PANTONE 165-1-7 U and PANTONE 13-3-7 U. Here is what I ended up with compared to the original photograph:

Overall I think the new Goe system will be quite helpful, if nothing else, in helping to organize the chaos that is the Pantone numbering system. Though many know that Pantone 426 and Pantone Gray 11 are both grays, having a system where it’s easy to recognize what end of the color spectrum a color should be will be quite nice and helpful. The duotones will also be very helpful, especially in projects that have a limited number of colors, which with the price of printing and the current economy, I assume will be quite a few.