Cary Sherburne: Hi, I’m Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink, and I’m here with Giovanni Marra, who is the Director of Corporate Marketing for Pantone, a name that was very well known in our industry.

Giovanni Marra: Thanks.

Cary Sherburne: Is vey well known; I didn’t mean to say was. And we’re gonna talk a little bit about some of the new things that you guys are doing in terms of some of the product and products that you’re bringing to market and so on. So you have this little device in your hand here called Capsure.

Giovanni Marra: Yes. Yes, yes.

Cary Sherburne: And you can tell us a little bit a about that. That’s a pretty cool little thing.

Giovanni Marra: Sure –

Cary Sherburne: And you’re leaving with me when you leave, right?

Giovanni Marra: Yeah, well I’m sure we’ll have something, we can leave here before we leave. Yes, this device is called Capsure. This is our great little device that was a collaboration between Pantone and X-Rite to put together this really easy to use color picker, is what it really is in the simplest sense. So the way people use it is it has all the Pantone libraries internally. So it’s somewhere around 13,000, 14,000 different Pantone colors are actually within the device. And you can put this sample over, say, my shirt. You can put the device over my shirt, measure it, and in about a second, second and a half, it’ll come back with a Pantone color match.

Cary Sherburne: And so this would be targeted primarily at designers or –

Giovanni Marra: It’s -- designers, definitely is a primary audience; and it’s everywhere from graphic designers and interior designers, fashion designers, product designers.

Cary Sherburne: You’re in the plastics industries, too. Does it apply there?

Giovanni Marra: Yes. Yes, so anybody that’s working with product design and plastics can actually use this to measure a sample and then coordinate it to a Pantone color for plastics, and more and more printers and manufacturers are using it as well because it’s actually – at the print shows that we’re at printers love this device because, actually, they can get in front of a customer and quite often a customer will come to them and give them anything, an old business card, some old collateral –

Cary Sherburne: So they can just say, oh, yeah I can do that. Yeah.

Giovanni Marra: And they’ll say match that color and they could quickly put this on top of color and it’ll come back with the closest Pantone match.

Cary Sherburne: That’s great. That’s a handy tool to have.

Giovanni Marra: Yes. Yes.

Cary Sherburne: And then color swatches, you guys are obviously well known for that. I had the pleasure of visiting you in New Jersey fairly recently and seeing that fabulous press with all the little dividers – what, 36 across?

Giovanni Marra: 28.

Cary Sherburne: 28, yeah.

Giovanni Marra: It’s 28 solid colors in one pass.

Cary Sherburne: Yeah, that’s great. So what do you have here?

Giovanni Marra: So just last week we announced 336 new colors that we added in to our Plus library and we had it done in addition of new colors in 2010, when we updated Pantone Matching System to the new Pantone Plus name. And that was very successful and, as usual, people wanted even more colors to work with, so we went through the last couple of years and flesh out the palette even more by adding in even more colors. So it’s another 336 colors on coated and uncoated stock. There’s some really bright colors here, very clean colors, a lot more greens, purples, blues.

Cary Sherburne: Beautiful.

Giovanni Marra: Some really hot oranges, reds. So definitely getting designers very excited.

Cary Sherburne: And last but not least, lighting indicators. What are those for?

Giovanni Marra: This is actually a product that’s also – we just also recently released. When we went in 2010 to Pantone Plus, we put in this lighting indicator page in the back of all our guides, so it can give kind of – it can give designers, printers, anybody working with color, a quick reference to their lighting conditions. So most people are aware that lighting actually does influence the way you perceive color, the way you view color, but very few people know what to do about it. So using the lighting indicator page within the guides, you can quickly say, well, this is actually a really bad place to be viewing a proof or be making a color-critical decision. So we also built these stickers to make them kind of easier to use. So a printer can actually put these stickers on a proof – on a press proof before they go to a client. Designers can put these on color samples that they’re sending around internally, and it just reminds people that you shouldn’t be looking at these – any sample or press proof in a poor lighting condition and maybe you need to get to a better lighting situation before you make a color-critical decision.

Cary Sherburne: It makes me think about going in to a Home Depot or a Lowes and looking at the paint chips, and you know, you gotta take them outside, really, to see what’s going on with them.

Giovanni Marra: Or then you paint your wall at home and the color looks totally different than what you saw.

Cary Sherburne: And then you’re like, wait a minute. This wasn’t what I picked. Well, that’s great. It’s great to see Pantone continuing to come to market with such innovating things. Thanks for sharing with us.

Giovanni Marra: Thank you.