O Jerseys, Jerseys, wherefore art thou Jerseys?

Good stuff timv even if I don't understand it all, ha! One reason I don't like to TELL the color but like the jersey subscriber to SEE it first is that if I say a jersey is (insert a color) that is highly open to interpretation. In the article mentioned above in fact, the author used turquoise where I would have definitely said cyan (the primary light mixing colors being red, green, blue and printing colors being cyan, magenta, yellow, with black added to make blacks really very black even if ink distributions among the CMY are not even. This is CMYK, where the K is for black. I don't know if they said pink for magenta, but that's another biggie.

And if you find a Pantone color book, look up the color rhodamine red and tell me what color you think that is!? And look at Pantone Red and tell me if that is what you thought when you heard it was red.

Another interesting thing is that some Pantone colors can't really be made well simply using the CMYK "process" colors. These colors are deemed "outside the gamut" of the CMYK process, and this why when a company or a skateylovin' website wants to get a color spot on, they turn to Pantone inks (or clones if there are any) and use the Pantone numbers to talk about such stuff on the phone and in emails and such. Pantone (Pantone Matching System) uses 14 basic colors and makes the other colors mostly by mixing those: They all start with the word PANTONE and they are:

• PANTONE Yellow
• PANTONE Yellow 012
• PANTONE Orange 021
• PANTONE Warm Red
• PANTONE Red 032
• PANTONE Rubine Red
• PANTONE Rhodamine Red
• PANTONE Purple
• PANTONE Violet
• PANTONE Blue 072
• PANTONE Reflex Blue
• PANTONE Process Blue
• PANTONE Green
• PANTONE Black

While it's not mentioned in the Basic colors, there's another trick, and that is:

• Transparent White

This is the main secret to the idea of the Roadskate.net jerseys. The idea is to create an overlay of the same color in various lightnesses like a monochrome stained glass window. I had an idea in mind that would use the RSN logo for the swirls but we needed something in a hurry so I went with the closest design I could find and modified that.

The swirls are like coffee cup swirls that led to the idea of the RSN logo which is supposed to swirl into an infinity symbol that encapsulates the RSN or RN as you prefer, either way (so the S can be an S or it can be an infinity sign, skateylove yes!). The loops of the R and N are inverted and flipped to suggest vaguely the yinyang and it's supposed to look computer graphic but hand drawn inkish. I bet I've written all of this before!

Pantone has a modified CMYK process as well called Hexachrome, with six colors: yellow, orange, magenta, cyan, green, black.

Using a Pantone color swatch book is a great aid when talking about colors, but if your printer uses CMYK you may fall in love with colors they can't produce well. This is one reason you can't always just pick any color but need to pick among ones they present in their basic options. A good printer or jersey maker will try to hit that color you want, but will also admit it when they know they aren't matching that color swatch in the book.

Pink? I think of pink as red that got mixed up with white, rather than magenta that's still strong but just caught halfway between blue and red. But that's just me thinking about colors as people in a color space. Violet's not shrinking at all if unfiltered and just more blue than Purple, who leans red but not far.