Happy New Year and welcome to 2020! Those style-setters over at Pantone have declared “Classic Blue” to be the color of the year and you’ll see it in everything from websites, clothing, sports equipment, advertising and home & garden products.
“So what exactly is Classic Blue?”
Classic Blue is the name of a particular swatch of blue and it is defined by the Pantone number of 19-4052. On the web, we’ll define that same color on phone, tablet and monitor screens by using a hex code of #34558b. If you’ve ever seen a Pantone color book or color chips, you’ve seen what designers, printers, painters and manufacturers use to be on the same page when talking about a particular color.
The human eye can see over 7 million colors and differentiate between the slightest shades between colors. So while the Pantone books don’t show every color your eye can see, they do specify thousands of them and set the standards for their various clients.