Long Before Pantone, This Bird-Based System for Describing Color Was a Hit

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On a sunny afternoon on the Pacific coast, Rhys Newman was sketching a pair of California Gulls when he had a realization. As an independent designer and birder who helps companies like Casper and Nokia define their visual identity, Newman thinks a lot about how colors go together—how certain combinations become distinct, recognizable, and associated with certain brands. 

So when gulls, with their gray feathers, yellow bill, and black wingtips, sat before him, “I just had that very kind of stupid, overly obvious observation,” he says. “You never look at [a bird] and go, ‘Ah, those colors don’t hang together, do they?’”

Birds, it seemed, combined colors in a way that served a purpose. After his seaside sketching session, Newman decided to look into whether anyone had tried to capture and categorize the colors of birds. It turned out someone had—more than a century ago. In 1912, taxonomist Robert Ridgway created an entire color dictionary based around bird hues, grouping avian-themed hues like Peacock Blue and Duck Green into systematic grids. Newman was stunned, then embarrassed. How, in all his years of birding and design experience, had never come across Ridgway’s work?

He realized that what Ridgway had done was create an early color system, splitting up colors visible to the human eye into a set of defined hues. Today’s modern equivalents, such as Pantone, CMYK, and RGB, are important tools in art and design. These systems create a common language that designers use to keep colors consistent while printing, creating, or distributing materials between different people and platforms.

But when Ridgway created his catalog, he had a different audience in mind: His dictionary was intended to help 20th century ornithologists study bird species and write about them accurately. Though this work focused more on the scientific applications of color, it’s part of a long line of efforts that try to explain and understand the many tones in the world around us—a topic that has fascinated humans for centuries.

“For me, in modern day design practice, that’s super resonant, because a lot of the time we’re trying to unify how we see the world,” says Newman, who has now embarked on a project to bring Ridgway’s dictionary into today’s color canon. “Ridgway was essentially doing that in a different context.”

Ridgway’s work on color began in the late 1800s, a time when Western taxonomists were collecting and describing many birds in North America and beyond and trying to figure out how species were related to one another. These scientists often wanted to communicate their findings across continents, but few illustrated field guides existed at the time. The ones published were “huge tomes,” too clunky and heavy to lug into the field, explains Sarah Luttrell, a researcher at the Smithsonian’s Feather Identification Lab. Most ornithologists instead described the birds they saw in writing, meaning that a standardized language around color was crucial. A vague description like “light blue” from one person could mean something completely different to another.

In addition to describing species, Ridgway thought understanding color—and using it precisely—could uncover key insights into the emerging science of evolution. Birds use colors in many ways: A male Red-winged Blackbird’s red shoulder signals its fitness to potential mates, for example, and a Common Nighthawk’s mottled brown plumage helps the camouflaged bird hide from predators. Colors, therefore, were distinct markers that could offer an evolutionary advantage, and to Ridgway, subtle color variations might contain clues on how species change and new ones arise. 

In 1886, Ridgway, with his wife Julia, hand-painted and published A Nomenclature of Colors for Naturalists. This book contained 186 colors in an attempt to create a standardized naming system. But Ridgway was unsatisfied. He later described the book as “seriously defective in the altogether inadequate number of colors represented, and in their unscientific arrangement.”

So he took on a bigger project, which grew into his magnum opus: Color Standards and Color Nomenclature in 1912. The guide contained 1,115 colors organized into a full spectrum of lightness, darkness, and vibrancies. The colors were printed onto large sheets of paper by a lithographic press, cut into tiny squares, and distributed onto 53 plates. Rather than just “light blue,” ornithologists could now pick from Jay Blue, Ultramarine Ash, or Dull Bluish Violet. They could also, for example, distinguish the Slate-Gray wings of a California Gull from the Neutral Gray of a Herring Gull. 

A total of 5,000 copies were published. “That’s a lot of copies of a book by anyone’s standards. It was in really wide circulation,” says Daniel Lewis, a historian at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, who wrote a 2012 biography of Ridgway. The color dictionary was an instant hit, used not only by naturalists but also stamp collectors, designers, and even those who worked on food color.

However, by the mid-1900s, Ridgway’s system became less useful as pocket-size illustrated field guides became common and cameras widespread. And simply, as psychology studies on perception have shown, it’s hard for people to assess color objectively—even with an extensive guide like Ridgway’s at their fingertips. Feathers can look different based on environment or how the light hits them, like an iridescent coat of a European Starling or a structural feather of a Blue Jay. Today, birders still use colors to describe the birds they encounter, but scientists typically use methods like DNA analysis to differentiate species and study evolution, says Luttrell.

Yet with the color-curious creators of the world, Ridgway’s work still strikes a chord. Newman, the designer in California, is currently working with other designers, coders, and artists to reinterpret Ridgway’s dictionary as a modern-day resource for looking at color through a bird-themed lens. Through the project, “Re-doing Ridgway,” the group aims to create a poster and eventually a color theory book based off of Ridgway’s work.

An obsession with color—and how to define it—permeates history, says Brooke Irish, a graphic designer who is working with Newman on his project. During the Renaissance, physicist Isaac Newton theorized that all color was a mix of light and darkness, and by the 19th century, Mary Gartside, the first woman color theorist, wrote about the effects of tint, warmth, and luminance while studying flowers in sunlight. In the 20th century, the painter Albert Munsell developed his namesake notation as “a rational way to describe color,” creating a numbering system to capture the hue, lightness, and intensity of colors.

And in 1949, according to a paper that Newman stumbled upon, a team of scientists at the University of Toronto used a color spectrograph to capture wavelengths of light and quantify the colors of Ridgway’s dictionary in Munsell’s notation—offering a crucial link to match the century-old book with modern colors. Lewis says the guide was probably an important influence for more contemporary color categorizations, though he was never able to confirm whether Ridgway was the direct inspiration for Pantone, due to limited access to the company’s archives. (Pantone did not respond to a request for comment.)

From Ridgway’s “Walnut Brown” to Pantone’s “Mocha Mousse”—its 2025 color of the year—all of these endeavors to describe our multicolor planet “are just us trying to give ourselves the language to talk to each other about these things we find so exciting,” says Irish. “And I don’t think that’s a human exercise that’ll ever change.”

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