Hardware entrepreneurship, how to accurately convey the color you expect to consumers?
Today, we will discuss the various Pantone color cards applicable to the structural components of electronic products and how to select the appropriate one for your project.You can also click here to watch the YouTube video.
Why a standard color system used worldwide Matter for Electronic Products
Structural components—such as plastic enclosures, metal casings, or rubberized grips—serve as a direct communication channel between your products and consumers. To prevent any misinterpretation of your intended color, utilize standard colors like Pantone, which enables you to communicate with the structural component manufacturer using a unified system. This ensures that your design vision is faithfully represented in the final product.
Based on our years of manufacturing experience in Environment Tech Digital Health Sports Tech Surveying Agri Tech Smart Building Mobility, let’s go through the key Pantone systems relevant to electronic product structural components:
This system is the most widely recognized within Pantone's offerings. The solid coated (C) and uncoated (U) guides offer an extensive array of colors suitable for various finishes. While primarily intended for paper printing and not directly applicable to plastics, their universal and convenient color standards, along with their affordability, make Pantone C cards popular in the injection molding and painting industries for initial color selection. Subsequent adjustments are then made based on the materials and effects during actual production.
These are Pantone's dedicated color guides for plastic materials, offering a broad spectrum of translucent, opaque, and metallic colors specifically designed for plastic substrates. They are perfect for molded plastic parts like keycaps, enclosures, or bezels. Each color chip comes with thickness variations, enabling you to observe how the material's thickness affects the color. You can also see both matte and shiny finishes.
This system provides metallic colors tailored for upscale finishes. When applying metal color to a product's surface or modifying the metal material's surface color through anodizing, the metal color system serves as a crucial guide. Metallic casings, buttons, or accents in electronic products are especially relevant for high-end or luxury electronics.
Although originally designed for textiles, this system is also effective for rubberized or soft-touch materials, including those with a matte finish in the soft painting process. It is ideal for wearable electronics or grips on tools and controllers.
Here are also some tips, which are both general knowledge and experience.
Align the Pantone system with the material. Opt for Plastics Standard Chips for plastics, Metallics for metal finishes, and TPG for soft-touch surfaces.
When choosing colors, always consider gloss, matte, or texture, as a Pantone color may look different on a glossy surface compared to a matte one.
Always ask for color samples or swatches from structural component manufacturers to verify the product's color during mass production.
If your product incorporates various materials, avoid attempting to match the exact color across them, as it can be expensive. A gray on metal may appear different on plastic. Instead, consider using a color-contrast scheme, which is more cost-effective.
Even with attempts to standardize color, implementing it still demands significant manual effort. When different manufacturers apply the same color, variations will occur, and these differences become more noticeable when the components are assembled together.