We don’t need a color honoring Prince to ensure the funky one’s legacy lives on, but we’re still happy to have one. Pantone has paid tribute to the departed musician with Love Symbol #2, a new purple color based on the shade of the artist’s iconic Yamaha piano.
The color’s name is shared with the iconic symbol that the artist used to replace his name during the 1990s. If you’re in a creative industry, you might learn the shade by its other, far less sexy, name: PANTONE PQ-7448C.
Here’s the shade, which was created in partnership with Prince’s estate, in its digital representation:
Laurie Pressman, the vice president of the Pantone Color Institute, released a few words on Prince and Love Symbol #2, offering:
“We are honored to have worked on the development of Love Symbol #2, a distinctive new purple shade created in memory of Prince, ‘the purple one.’ A musical icon known for his artistic brilliance, Love Symbol #2 is emblematic of Prince’s distinctive style. Long associated with the purple family, Love Symbol #2 enables Prince’s unique purple shade to be consistently replicated and maintain the same iconic status as the man himself.”
The notion of “creating” a new color can be a bit misleading. Pantone doesn’t make colors itself, but rather what the organization does is standardize, benchmark, and essentially “legitimize” colors to ensure that the shades remain consistent among manufacturers, printers, and paint and ink companies. Pantone benchmarks the colors using several different methods depending on the medium.
While Prince’s purple has been announced and revealed, a glance at the color’s Pantone page reveals that the values for the color (RGB, CMYK/OGV, and HEX/HTML) have not been made public.
Perhaps that’s best. Prince’s purple is really more of a state of mind than it is a Pantone value or color swatch.
Knowing that it’s safe to say that there’s a little bit of Love Symbol #2 in all of us. But now Pantone, bless them, has made it possible to paint our bedrooms that color.
