Design moment: Pantone, circa 1962

If there really are 40 shades of green, then how to describe each one? Take “grass green” – not everyone has the same idea what a lush lawn looks like. Enter Lawrence Herbert, a young graduate hired in the mid-1950s by a print and advertising company in New York, who upon seeing just how difficult it was to communicate colours set about designing what he called “a universal language of colour”.

By the time he had bought out the company in 1962 and named it Pantone, he had devised a system of numbers that could be applied to a vast range of colours. The advertising world loved it; the expanding business of developing brand identities for a global market meant that if a company’s logo was a certain shade of blue in the US, they’d want the exact same blue all over the world. “If somebody in New York wanted something printed in Tokyo, they would simply open up the book and say, ‘Give me Pantone 123’ ”, he said of his system.

Standardisation is the key to so much in marketing communication – the Apple II, for example, a muddy beige, was Pantone 453. The red in the American flag is No 193. By the 1970s his company was making more than $1 million a year in licensing fees for its ink colours.

The signature Pantone product are its guides, those narrow cardboard sheets printed with small, numbered colour swatches. Each sheet will contain several variations of the same colour and the sheets fan out, a boon to designers, who can see a range of colours spread out before them.

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Every year the company nominates a “Colour of the Year”. More than halfway through 2017, it’s hard to see much evidence of this year’s colour, Greenery: Pantone 15-0343 #88D04B”, although such is the reach of the Pantone colour system in all aspects of visual culture, that is almost certain to be serving as a reference point for designers across the globe.