Colors, with their rich shades, have long gone beyond art. They play an important role in the life of modern man, are the subject of scientific research, their complex range makes up a whole system of samples and special atlases, each of which represents a color palette with color names indicated by alphanumeric indices.
There are many such palettes. They serve as standards for the visual comparison needed in the manufacture of industrial goods, design, construction, advertising, photography, television, computer graphics, and many other areas. The main ones are three standardized systems: RAL, NCS, Pantone. The article will tell about these and some other models, providing them with a color palette with color names in Russian and digital indexes.
RAL system
This is the first color standard in the world, the most popular and widespread today. It has existed since 1927, it was developed in the form of a table by the German State Committee for Quality Assurance, and the abbreviation RAL was formed from the initial letters of this organization (Reich Ausschluβ für Lieferbedingungen). The institution initially prepared a color palette with the names for paint and varnish production in order to systematize the shades of the composition, the variety of which was rapidly increasing. Gradually, new positions were added to the table, and the system installed by RAL became the universal means of communication when choosing colors, adopted in forty countries for many industrial, engineering and design industries.
Now in the RAL palette several thousand samples are represented by the collections: Classic, Design, Effect, Plastics, Books. In them, all the items are systematized according to nine colors of the developed RAL range and reflect the gamut of yellow, orange, red, violet, blue, green, gray, brown, as well as light and dark (black, white) shades.
RAL Classic
The basic scale, considered the base for all collections created by the RAL Institute. She was the very first and for a long time remained the only one. At first, its rather poor palette was gradually enriched with new shades, and today it has 213 samples, of which 17 positions correspond to metallic shades with reflective pigments. In the Ral palette, the color gamut with the Classic names is most in demand, it is used as a reference for many industries:
- production of consumer goods;
- graphic, industrial, automotive, printing, urban design;
- interior and architecture;
- manufacture of paint and varnish mixtures, plastic products and other polymeric compounds;
- tinting, that is, the selection and mixing of colors to the desired shade and volume directly at the points of sale of colorful compositions.
In the Classic palette, each position has a four-digit index. The first digit reflects one of the nine numbers in the RAL color range, the next two digits indicate the hue number. The last sign of the index indicates the presence of a metallic effect. Below is an example of a color palette with color names in Russian.
Ral design
The need for professional design to systematize shades not only by color, but also by their brightness and saturation, led to the creation of the Design scale, developed by the institute in 1993. The collection combines 1625 items. Their systematization is reflected in a seven-digit index, where the first three digits indicate one of the nine colors of the RAL range with the numbers of their shades that correspond to the color palette with the names Classic. The next two digits indicate the brightness level, and the last two - the degree of saturation. This classification makes it easy and simple to select harmonious color combinations.
Other RAL collections
The company has several more palettes for convenient use by specialists in various industries.
- In 2007, the RAL Institute for the industrial sector developed a collection of colors with the name of the Effect palette, consisting of 420 samples of matte paints and 70 glossy ones with a metallic effect.
- For plastic products, RAL has prepared a special collection of Plastics, which includes the 100 most popular shades of the Classic palette.
- RAL Books is an annual reference guide for professional designers that offers kits with combinations of 32 different colors and shades. The RAL Institute prepares these handbooks in conjunction with Global Color Research, a British design bureau.
RAL also developed as a software application a digital version of color layouts called Digital, which included 2, 328 positions in the Classic, Design, Effect palettes.
NCS Model
The name of the system comes from the abbreviation Natural Color System, which means the natural color system. The development belongs to the Scandinavian Institute of Color in Stockholm. The system has been used since 1979 and built on the principle of six opposite pure colors (black-white, red-green, yellow-blue), the combination of which makes up all the other shades.
The NCS Standard Colors catalog consists of 1950 items. It is impossible to cite his color palette with the names of colors in Russian in one article. The designations of each shade are described by an alphanumeric index, consisting of eight characters and a broken hyphen in two parts, where the letters indicate the English names of six colors:
- the first two digits reflect the relative degree of gradation of the dark, that is, the percentage of presence of black;
- the next two numbers indicate the percentage of color saturation or purity;
- the second part of the index consists of letters and numbers, where the first letter indicates one of the primary colors present, two numbers reflect the percentage of the second color, which indicates the last letter.
The NCS system is used not so much to mix shades as to describe them. The model is approved by the color standard in the Scandinavian countries, Sweden, Spain, and is used by a total of 19 countries. The palette has also been adopted as a benchmark by ICA, one of the leading international organizations that publishes color trends forecasts for the coming seasons that will be used by industrial designers.
Pantone Model
The system, also called Pantone Matching System or PMS, was proposed by the American company Pantone Inc. The model has been used since 1963, mainly for color selection and comparison in printing printing. Sometimes used in the manufacture of paints, fabrics and plastics. The Palette 1114 of standardized Pantone samples consists of a color gamut modeled by the CMYK method and through color mixtures, namely:
- the CMYK process using four colors — cyan, magenta, yellow, and black — is considered the world's most common color printing method.
- most Pantone system colors go beyond the CMYK print range and reproduce 13 major pigments with black additions by mixing in certain amounts.
Pantone color palette has no names of shades, and all positions in special catalogs are numbered. There are several such catalogs, for example, for conditions on glossy and coated paper, with metallized, fluorescent samples of paints and others.
PMS colors are almost always used in logos of various brands and even found a place in state legislation and military standards when describing the colors of flags and seals. In January 2003, the Scottish Parliament debated a motion stating the blue color of the Scottish flag as Pantone-300. US states, including Texas, have established PMS legislative colors for their flags. The International Automobile Federation of the FIA and countries such as Canada, South Korea, decided to also use specific Pantone designs for color rendering of flags.
Other palettes
Among the many color standards, there are several more known:
- ICI Paints - the palette of the world's largest manufacturer of paints and varnishes, known under the Dulux brand; totals 1379 samples and nineteen gray filters, allowing to receive a total of 27580 shades;
- the palette modeled on the Mansell color system contains 1, 600 positions;
- Villalobos's color palette includes 7, 279 samples.
Each manufacturer of paints, furniture, automobiles, cosmetics, textiles, and many other industries has its own color layout. Most of the positions in these collections correspond to the colors of the above systems, but some samples can be exclusive and developed by the company itself or by its order. Special color lists have been set by the administrations of some cities as the official system of standards for the color of building facades and external architectural elements. An example is the Moscow color palette.
For computer graphics, there is an HTML palette based on a combination of three colors: green, red, blue. This is a binary color coding system in RGB graphics editors, but color values can also be represented in hexadecimal. The three-color combination is 16 standard shades, which are listed below in the HTML color palette with color names in Russian, English, as well as numerical values (RGB, CMYK format). Each of these shades also has many gradations presented in separate tables.
