Colors with their richness of shades have long gone beyond art. They play an important role in the life of a modern person, they 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 benchmarks for visual comparison needed in manufacturing, design, construction, advertising, photography, television, computer graphics, and many other fields. Three standardized systems are considered to be the main ones: RAL, NCS, Pantone. The article will talk about these and some other models, providing their color palette with color names in Russian and digital indices.
RAL system
This is the world's first colorstandard, the most popular and widespread today. It has existed since 1927, 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 names for paint and varnish industries in order to systematize the shades of composite compositions, the variety of which was rapidly increasing. Gradually, new positions were added to the table, and the system installed by RAL became a universal means of communication in choosing a color, adopted in forty countries for many industrial, design and design industries.
Now the RAL palette combines several thousand samples from the collections: Classic, Design, Effect, Plastics, Books. In them, all items are systematized according to the nine colors of the developed RAL range and reflect the gamut of yellow, orange, red, purple, blue, green, gray, brown, as well as light and dark (black, white) shades.
RAL Classic
The main 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. Her palette, which was not rich at first, was gradually enriched with new shades, and today it has 213 samples, of which 17 positions correspond to metallic shades with light-reflecting pigments. In the "Ral" palette, the color schemewith the titles Classic is the most sought after, it is used as a reference for many industries:
- production of consumer goods;
- graphic, industrial, automotive, print, urban design;
- interior and architecture;
- production of paint mixtures, plastic products and other polymer 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 item has a four-digit index. The first digit reflects one of the nine RAL color range numbers, the next two digits represent the shade number. The last sign of the index informs about the presence of a "metallic" effect. Below is a sample color palette with color names in Russian.
RAL Design
The need in professional design to organize 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 by a seven-digit index, where the first three digits mean one of the nine colors of the RAL range with the numbers of their shades, which correspond to the color palette with the names Classic. The next two numbers indicate the level of brightness, 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 easy use by professionals in various industries.
- In 2007, the RAL institute developed a collection of colors for the industrial sector with the name of the Effect palette, consisting of 420 samples of matt paints and 70 metallic glossy ones.
- For plastic products, RAL has prepared a special Plastics collection, which includes 100 of the most popular shades of the Classic palette.
- RAL Books is an annual guide for professional designers that offers kits in 32 different color and shade combinations. The RAL Institute prepares these guides in collaboration with Global Color Research, a British design firm.
RAL has also developed as a software application a digital version of the color layouts called Digital, which includes 2328 positions of the Classic, Design, Effect palettes.
NCS Model
The name of the system comes from the abbreviation Natural Color System, denoting the natural color system. The development belongs to the Scandinavian Color Institute in Stockholm. The system has been used since 1979 and is based on the principle of six opposite pure colors (black-white, red-green, yellow-blue), the combination of which makes up all other shades.
The NCS Standard Colors catalog consists of 1950 items. It is impossible to give his color palette with the names of colors in Russian in one article. Designations of each shadeare described by an alphanumeric index consisting of eight characters and divided by a hyphen into two parts, where 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 the 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 indicated by the last letter.
The NCS system is used not so much to mix shades as to describe them. The model is approved as 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 reference by the ICA, one of the leading international organizations that publishes forecasts of color trends for the coming seasons to be used by industrial designers.
Pantone Model
The system, which is also called the Pantone Matching System or PMS, is proposed by the American company Pantone Inc. The model has been used since 1963, mainly for color matching and comparison in printing. It is sometimes used in the manufacture of paint, textiles and plastics. The palette of 1114 standardized Pantone swatches consists of a color gamut modeled by CMYK and color mixtures, as follows:
- The most common color printing method in the world is the CMYK process using four colors - cyan, magenta, yellow and black;
- Most of Pantone's system colors are outside the CMYK print gamut and are reproduced by blending the 13 primary pigments in certain quantities with the addition of black.
The Pantone color palette does not have shade names, and all positions in special catalogs are numbered. There are several such catalogs, for example, for conditions on glossy and coated paper, with metallic, fluorescent ink samples and others.
PMS colors are almost always used in the logos of various brands and have even found a place in government legislation and military standards when describing the colors of flags and seals. In January 2003, the Scottish Parliament debated a motion referring to the blue color of the Scottish flag as the Pantone-300. American states, including Texas, have established PMS legislative colors for their flags. The International Automobile Federation FIA and countries such as Canada, South Korea have also decided to use specific Pantone samples for the color rendering of flags.
Other palettes
Among the many color standards, there are several more well-known:
- ICI Paints - the palette of the world's largest manufacturer of paints and varnishes, known under the Dulux brand; has 1379 samples and nineteen gray filters for a total of 27580shades;
- Palette modeled after the Munsell color system contains 1600 items;
- Villalobos' color palette includes 7279 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 named systems, but some samples may be exclusive and developed by the company itself or by order. Special color lists are established by the administrations of some cities as an 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 the binary color coding system in RGB graphics editors, but color values can also be represented in hexadecimal encoding. The three-color combination is 16 standard shades, which are given 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.
Correct shade names
There are over 2,000 words for colors in Russian. Most of them have fallen into disuse, some are quite exotic or not widely used. Not worth itforget that the names of colors are often arbitrary and subjective, different in different cultures, and therefore cannot be considered absolutely correct. Specialists, if it is necessary to designate a shade with words, mainly use the names of samples from the RAL Classic palette, which are considered a universal language tool that describes the color.
