It was 1960 when Lawrence Herbert was working in a color printing and sales company mainly focused on cosmetics. This businessman and great visionary chose to take over the assets of a company that was $50,000 in debt.

In 1962 Herbert founded Pantone, creating a new formula from 10 pigments to obtain more uniform results, and resulting in a guide of 500 colors. The success was immediate in companies dedicated to the graphic arts, industrial, and textile industries; a great example of its usefulness was the Kodak brand, which during the ’50s began to suffer great losses in the sale of its photo reels because of its boxes the yellow color did not always share its homogeneity, causing people to reject the packages with a darker shade that led them to think that it was not the original of the brand or that perhaps it had expired.

These well-known and widely used color guides in the world of design are a “must” that has also managed to sneak into the creative universe by varying and playing with more and more surprising models. What many do not know is that the first guide like Pantone was created by a Dutch artist. A. Boogert wrote in the year 1692 a detailed work in which he presented colors and their scales in watercolor, discovering their nuances to the world by mixing them with each other.

Only one copy of this sensational and advanced volume exists in the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix-en-Provence, France. This is because in 1692 the printing press did not yet have the technology to print such a treatise. It would be another hundred years before it could be reproduced with any reliability, through lithography.