Pantone, 1963
Pantone's breakthrough was not a color book. It was a shared language that let a fragmented supply chain coordinate.
The thesis
Pantone's breakthrough was not a color book. It was a shared language that let a fragmented supply chain coordinate. A formula-backed number connected designers, printers, and ink makers without requiring every handoff to depend on one person's eye.
The business lesson is the shift from translator to reference. Pantone turned internal ink-room knowledge into a standard that other companies could distribute, specify, and build around.
The artifact
I researched, wrote, and designed an annotated business-history case. The compact visual layer uses the case's authored 11-swatch roster, ordered yellow first and then light to dark. It is not spectral order. The sequence preserves the ink-room logic documented in the close read.
Corrections stay visible as marginalia. Founder lore, archival evidence, and inference do not silently collapse into one voice. Generated period imagery is never treated as evidence.
What AI did
Claude accelerated public-source research and drafting. I set the thesis, designed the artifact, and kept unresolved threads visibly unresolved.