Have you ever wondered what it takes to bring colors like Midnight Purple or Soul Red from an idea in someone’s head to a final color on a showroom floor? How Dodge goes from someone thinking up “Hey, what if we did purple?” to seeing Plum Crazy in your configurator? Well, wonder no more: Road & Track has your answer.
Our friend Zac Palmer over at R&T looked into the process of developing colors for automakers, including talking with folks from carmakers and paint suppliers to learn how it works from all sides. It starts with the color and materials designers at the car companies, who are constantly looking for color trends — or rather, what’s going to be a trend in a year when the color actually makes it to market. From there, the paint manufacturer gets involved to translate designers’ ideas into an actual formulation of pigments and flakes that manifests a described shade onto the panels of real-life cars.
Give the full Road & Track piece a read
Palmer spoke with Misty Yeomans, who manages automotive color styling at PPG, to learn about that step of the paint production process. There are all sorts of industry terms, different ways to describe how paint looks on a flat upright surface compared to a horizontal one or a curve, and they’re all explained in the full Road & Track piece.
Give R&T a click on this one, it’s a fascinating look into a part of the car world that doesn’t get as much appreciation as it deserves. Any of us can name our favorite car color, but so few of us know about the people who made that color into the thing we love — the folks who came up with it in some automaker ideas meeting, and the people at the paint supplier who brought it into the real world. Next time you see your favorite car color out and about, take a second to think about how it got there.
