Every industry that works with colour at scale eventually builds its own colour standard. Paint manufacturers have one. Textile mills have several. Soil scientists have one. Forensic pathologists have one. Printers have the most famous one. They do not talk to each other, and each exists because the people in that industry got tired of arguing about what colour something was, every single day, forever.
Here is a short tour of the major systems, why each of them exists, and what each one is actually good at. If you have ever wondered why there are twenty different ways to specify an orange, the answer is that twenty different industries each needed to.
Munsell, the first serious attempt
Albert Henry Munsell was an American art teacher and painter who got frustrated in the 1890s that his students could not describe colour precisely. He decided to fix it. In 1905 he published A Color Notation, which proposed describing every colour with three numbers: hue, value, and chroma.
- Hue, which colour family, measured around a wheel with ten principal hues further divided into numbered steps.
- Value, how light or dark, on a scale from 0 (black) to 10 (white).
- Chroma, how saturated, with 0 meaning grey and the upper end depending on the hue.
A Munsell colour is written like 5YR 6/10, five-yellow-red, value six, chroma ten. Each one is a specific colour chip on a specific Munsell swatch book.
Munsell matters because it was the first colour system designed around human perception rather than around pigment recipes or printing ink. Munsell spent years refining his scales by having people visually match colour chips, then adjusting until equal numerical steps corresponded to equal perceived steps. This was a painstaking empirical process.
The system is still in use. It is how archaeologists describe the colour of pottery shards, how the USDA grades soil samples, how meat inspectors assess freshness, and how paint companies calibrate their mixers. It never became the consumer-facing standard, it is too precise for most uses, but it quietly runs much of the scientific colour world.
The Natural Color System, Sweden’s answer
In the 1960s, a Swedish colour research group led by Anders Hård developed the Natural Color System (NCS), based on the theory that humans psychologically perceive colours as mixes of six “elementary” colours: red, yellow, green, blue, black, and white. Any colour can be described by saying how much of each it contains.
An NCS notation looks like S 2060-Y10R. The first number (20) is blackness; the second (60) is chromaticness; the letters describe the hue as a position between two pure hues.
NCS is the dominant colour system in Scandinavia, widely used in architectural and interior paint specifications. Its appeal is that the notation describes how the colour feels to a viewer, not how it was mixed. A designer who has internalized the system can describe desired colours without a swatch book.
Outside Scandinavia, NCS is less common but still used in European architecture and graphic design. In North America it is an obscure curiosity.
Pantone, the commercial dominator
Pantone Inc. started in 1963 when Lawrence Herbert, a young chemist at a commercial printing firm, realized that printing companies across America were all producing slightly different versions of the same ink because there was no shared recipe book. He bought the company, renamed it Pantone, and published the Pantone Matching System, a set of numbered ink recipes that a printer anywhere in the country could mix to produce the exact same colour.
Pantone’s innovation was not the science. The science was straightforward colourimetry. The innovation was physical swatch books. A designer could pick a Pantone number from a book, send that number to a printer, and the printer could reproduce the colour exactly by following the Pantone recipe. This eliminated an enormous category of client-printer arguments.
By the 1980s, Pantone had extended into fashion, packaging, plastics, cosmetics. Each industry got its own library. The company built a near-monopoly on colour specification in commercial industries.
Pantone’s downsides are significant. The recipes are proprietary, you cannot compute a Pantone colour from first principles; you have to own the swatch book, which costs hundreds of dollars and has to be replaced every two years because the inks fade. Pantone aggressively protects this IP. In 2022 they introduced licensing fees for the Adobe Creative Cloud Pantone plugin, briefly cutting off designers’ access to thousands of colours until Adobe negotiated terms.
For brand work, though, Pantone is still the dominant language. When a client says “I want the brand colour to be Pantone 186,” every printer and textile mill in the world knows exactly what they mean.
RAL, the German industrial standard
RAL started in 1927 as a German government committee on quality standards. Their colour system, RAL Classic, was a list of about 40 numbered paint colours for industrial applications, machinery, traffic signs, building exteriors. The numbered system has expanded over the decades and today includes around 220 classic colours plus thousands more in extended ranges.
RAL is the dominant standard in continental European industrial design. Street signs across Germany are RAL 1023 yellow. Fire engines across Austria are RAL 3000 red. The numbered codes are public and non-proprietary, which is part of why RAL has retained influence even as Pantone tried to move in.
For North American designers, RAL is useful to know only because some European architectural specs still use it. Otherwise, Pantone dominates commercial work on this continent.
CIE, the scientific foundation
In 1931 the Commission Internationale de l’Éclairage (CIE), the international standards body for lighting, published the CIE 1931 chromaticity diagram. This was not a colour-naming system. It was a mathematical model that mapped every human-visible colour to a specific coordinate, based on measurements of how actual human observers responded to test patches of light.
CIE 1931 is the foundation that every other colour space, sRGB, Adobe RGB, Display P3, all the rest, is defined on top of. When we say “sRGB covers 35% of the visible gamut,” what we mean is that sRGB’s three primaries, plotted on the CIE 1931 diagram, form a triangle whose area is 35% of the full horseshoe-shaped visible region.
CIE’s successor systems, CIE 1976, CIE 2000, are the mathematical backbone of every professional colour-difference calculation in film, photography, and manufacturing. When a smartphone review says “the new phone covers 95% of the DCI-P3 colour space,” the measurement is done against CIE coordinates.
The digital systems
The systems above were all invented for physical materials, pigments, inks, dyes. The arrival of digital displays in the 1970s and 80s created a need for digital-native colour systems.
- sRGB, 1996, HP and Microsoft. Default for the web and most consumer displays.
- Adobe RGB, 1998. Wider-gamut alternative aimed at professional photography.
- DCI-P3, 2007. Developed for digital cinema projection. Apple adopted it for iPhones in 2016.
- Rec. 2020, 2012. Target for 4K and 8K broadcast television. Enormous gamut.
- Display P3, a consumer refinement of DCI-P3, used by recent Apple and some Windows devices.
Each is a specification: which primaries, which white point, which gamma. They differ only in which subset of the CIE-defined visible gamut they cover. Your monitor is specified as covering X% of some specific one of these spaces.
The soil, the blood, the tea
Specialised industries have their own. Worth knowing these exist:
- Munsell Soil Color, USDA standard for describing soil samples. Archaeologists use it for pottery.
- Fitzpatrick skin type scale, dermatology standard for classifying human skin tones, used for sun-damage research and cosmetic testing.
- Forel-Ule scale, 19th-century oceanography standard for water colour, still used in environmental monitoring.
- Rock-Color Chart, geology standard for describing rock samples.
- Gardner scale, chemical industry standard for the colour of oils and resins.
- Lovibond tintometer, scale for the colour of beer, wine, maple syrup, and olive oil, dating to 1885.
Each of these is a legitimate, rigorous colour system built for a specific domain. Each has zero overlap with the design-industry systems above. An archaeologist sees “10YR 6/4” and thinks “light yellowish brown pottery from the Mycenaean period.” A web developer sees the same string and thinks it is a typo.
Why this matters for design
For a working designer in 2026, the practical hierarchy is:
- CIE-based colour spaces, sRGB, Display P3, Adobe RGB, define what your screen can show and what your code compiles to.
- Pantone (or RAL if you are European), defines brand-critical colours that must survive the trip to print or textile.
- OKLCH / HSL, the notations you reason in when designing.
- Hex, the notation you serialize to for transmission and storage.
You can mostly ignore Munsell, NCS, Farrow & Ball, and the specialised systems unless you are working in their specific industries. But knowing they exist, knowing that there are soil scientists and film colourists and Swedish architects all arguing about colour in entirely different vocabularies from you, is useful context. It reminds you that every colour system is a workaround for the fundamental problem that colour is continuous and names are not.
Every system is an attempt to impose a grid on a surface that does not have one. The grids disagree because the humans who made them were each trying to solve different problems. That is not a bug in colour. That is colour being what it is.