At the Ben & Jerry's quality assur-ance lab in St. Albans, Vt. a technician in a white coat stands before a black Pantone light box and, with a careful eye, compares the shade of cooked brownies in a petri dish with two Pantone color cards. If the brownie hue falls between Pantone 469 rich brown and the sharper Pantone 490 purplish brown, it means the brownies are consistent with those lumped in previous pints and are neither under- nor overcooked. And a waiting truckload of 10 million brownies will become part of Ben & Jerry's next shipment of Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream. Makers of thousands of products use the Pantone color system, invented 40 years ago by a onetime ink mixer named Lawrence Herbert, to help define and calibrate their appearance, brand colors, print ads and more. Long before Lawrence had worked for an ad agency's printing division, named Pantone even back then, he saw a need for one standard system of measuring and describing colors, so that inkmakers, printing companies and designers would all be on the same page.
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