Art & Design

Your boundary is at hue 189, bluer than 98% of the population. For you, turquoise is green.

I was a graphic designer. I'm picky about colors. Color names are pretty much useless as demonstrated by this site. It's why we use things like the Pantone matching system. Both to pick colors that don't have names, and to have a standard to match printed output to.

Colors can be, and are, spec'ed by CMYK, RGB, and Hex values, but those values don't guarantee the colors will match. Monitors and printing presses of various types all output color differently. Screen printing a shirt, is different from CMYK printing on an offset printer, and printing on a laser printer. They'll all produce slightly different, or sometimes very different, results for the same values input.

For printing, a spot color is often used, that is, a specific color of ink, say Coca-Cola Red, that is mixed and added as a fifth color to the usual CMYK plates. That way the color is guaranteed to match. Fabric dyes are also custom mixed, of course.

A physical, printed book, like a Pantone swatch book, or even a color card produced by the company, is the only way to check how close the color is. And, there are acceptable ranges depending on the product, someone at, say, Coca-Cola, decides whether a color produced is close enough. They understand there are variances due to technology. "Close enough", though, will always be very damn close for a larger company, but not necessarily perfect. They don't fuck around with their branding.