The company’s strategy is to straddle a range of industries as the dominant supplier of applications, technologies and tools to ensure consistent, accurate colour across any material or media. In this respect, it is moving away from being a colour measurement company and towards becoming a ‘colour appearance’ company. While it has competitors in all of its markets, there is no other organisation that operates across them in the same way.

It is interesting to assess how much has happened within the organisation since it acquired Pantone in 2007. Since that time, X-Rite has gone through a major financial restructure and internal restructuring to incorporate Pantone.

X-Rite and Pantone are helping to lead the transition to digital colour communication. While the company maintains that physical standards will always be necessary for visual evaluation, companies for whom colour decisions are critical, can benefit more and more from digital communication of colour data.  

In addition to this, the company is expanding its colour services business to work with major brand owners in implementing accurate brand colour presentations on a worldwide basis. And indeed it already provides such a service to a number of the world’s leading brands.

Out of gamut
While the Pantone Matching System (PMS) and the new Pantone Plus Series are very successful, they do have limitations. PMS is a solution that allows for visual colour selection from a printed Fandeck or from colour patches within software applications, such as Adobe Creative Suite. There are, however, many colours that cannot be reproduced with the four-colour process. The Fandeck swatches are also substrate dependant and thus do not accurately represent how a colour will appear on a different substrate.

To counter this, X-Rite is developing some interesting new tools to allow designers and prepress professionals to verify whether or not a colour is within a press’s gamut before even the proofing stage, allowing for better colour choices to be made from the start. ColourMunki Design and the new Pantone Colour Manager allow designers and imaging professionals to check whether a colour is ‘print safe’ in advance.

One of the keys for converting to a completely digital workflow is the Colour Exchange Format (CXF), an XML-based open file format that holds far more information about colour and its presentation than any other way of representing colour. CXF is the power behind X-Rite’s colour services operations for working with major brand owners. When the applications and devices in a workflow speak and accept CXF data, it opens the door for unambiguous colour communication across all the players in the production value chain. 

However, X-Rite’s plan is to widen the scope of CXF to handle far more than just colour data; it intends CXF to handle details such as substrate, reflection, gloss, opacity, lighting and surface effects. X-Rite is also working with the International Standards Organisation in the hope that CXF will become the ISO standard for colour and appearance metadata communication.

The X-Rite/Pantone strategy in making colour specification and usage a full digital process is ultimately moving beyond merely the use of CXF, into creating databases of all critical colour and, eventually, appearance, data for any industry that requires accurate representation of colours, in whatever way they need to be used anywhere in the world.

X-Rite is about to launch its new suite of i1 solutions, featuring the next-generation i1Publish software, which replaces its legacy i1Match, ProfileMaker and MonacoProfiler solutions. The company is also working with key partners to help make colour management easier for office applications. There are also many other interesting developments underway as it works to enhance its overall offerings in all of its markets – which is why I firmly believe that X-Rite is ‘The Colour Company’.

Andrew Tribute is a journalist and consultant in digital pre-press and pre-media marketing technology. Visit his website here

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30-SECOND BRIEFING ON... X-RITE
• Although most people in the printing industry know X-Rite as a supplier of colour measurement tools to the printing industry, it straddles a number of colour-critical industries
• The company’s strategy is to be the dominant supplier of applications, technologies and tools to ensure consistent, accurate colour across any material or media. It is already working with major brand owners in implementing accurate colour presentations on a global basis
• One of the company’s most interesting developments is the Colour Exchange Format (CXF). However, the company plans to expand the abilities of this format to standardise other elements, such as substrate, reflection, gloss and opacity
• The X-Rite/Pantone strategy in making colour specification and usage a full digital process is ultimately moving beyond merely the use of CXF, into creating databases of all critical colour and, eventually, appearance, data for any industry that requires accurate representation of colour, in whatever way it needs to be used