Color accuracy is one of the most important things in custom socks manufacturing. To ensure the socks are of the same color as designed, we suggest our clients to use Pantone TCX colors reference, which is designed by Pantone LLC for industrial use, especially for cotton yarn and fiber. Other pantone matching systems such as pantone C, Pantone U, are designed for printings on coated and uncoated papers, respectively. In this post we will show you how to match pantone tcx colors for your sock design.
There are 3 ways that you can find pantone tcx colors for your design:
- Buy a pantone cotton passport (FHIC200).
- Use Pantone color manager (free if you purchase a pantone color passport).
- Match pantone tcx colors using online free official tools.
1.Buy a pantone cotton passport (FHIC200)
2.Use Pantone color manager (free if you purchase a pantone color passport).
You can use pantone color manager to access over 10,000 Pantone Colors for use in Adobe® design programs. However, note that pantone tcx color reference offers only 2310 colors. If you don’t have a cotton passport at hand simply buy it from pantone color manager website.Check out the video on Pantone Youtube Channel for a quick guide on how to use pantone color manager:
3.Match pantone tcx colors using online free official tools.
3.1 Go to https:www.pantone.com/color-finder
Color finder is an official tool for you to select proper pantone colors, but note that the digital color simulations vary from different screens thus it do not match the physical Pantone Color Standards. In addition, if you have a pantone color code but have no idea about its actual color on screen, you can find the color here using the code.
3.2 Select your ideal color on your screen;
Once you are in the color-finder page, select your color in the left side and then click “SUBMIT”. For example,I find the light blue(see pic below) fits my design well and I want to find the Pantone TCX color of it to ensure color accuracy.
3.3 Scroll down the page to section “Fashion and Interior Designers”
There are 3 section in the results page:
- Graphic Designers;
- Fashion and Interior Designers;
- Industrial Designers;
What we want is to select TCX colors in the “Fashion and Interior Designers” section, the other 2 sections are not for cotton industry;
So we see 3 colors(there might be more or less colors for your case) ending with “TCX”, you can just choose the best code from these 3 colors.
End
So We have pretty much known how to specify and match pantone tcx colors for your sock designs, now copy the colors into your sock design&mockup (.ai) files so that we can dye the yarn into correct colors, cheers!