From Hering’s theory to a Swedish system.

NCS stands for Natural Colour System, and the name describes the idea behind it. Wikipedia calls NCS a proprietary perceptual colour model: a way of naming colours by how they look to a person, not by how they are mixed from paint or light. It rests on the colour-opponency hypothesis of the German physiologist Ewald Hering, who argued that human vision is organised around opposing pairs of colour sensations.

The roots are old. Cool Hunting, writing on 25 October 2010, said Swedish research into colour perception began in the 1920s, building on Hering’s work of 1874, and that the Scandinavian Colour Institute, set up in 1946, was tasked with turning that research into a descriptive language for talking about colour. Swedish Wikipedia credits the physicist Tryggve Johansson with presenting an earlier Swedish version of a natural colour system.

The version in use now came later. Wikipedia says it was developed by the Swedish Colour Centre Foundation from 1964 onwards, by a research team of Anders Hård, Lars Sivik and Gunnar Tonnquist. The system is built entirely on the phenomenology of perception, Wikipedia says, which is the sense of “natural” in its name: it describes colour sensations as they are experienced, where models such as RGB and CMYK describe the physical processes used to make colour on a screen or a press.

Everything in NCS starts from six elementary colours: white, black, yellow, red, blue and green. Swedish Wikipedia gives their letters as W, S (for the Swedish svart), Y, R, B and G. The last four are the chromatic elementary colours, sometimes called unique hues. Each is treated as a sensation that cannot be described in terms of the others. Every other colour is described by how closely it resembles them, so a saturated pink, in Wikipedia’s example, is defined by its likeness to red, blue, black and white.

One rule follows from Hering’s opposing pairs. No colour in NCS can look both reddish and greenish at once, or both yellowish and bluish. A colour can sit between yellow and red, or between red and blue, but there is no “redgreen” and no “yellowblue”. That rule shapes the NCS colour circle, with the four chromatic elementary colours placed at its quarter points.

A code you can read without a sample.

The product NCS sells is, at heart, a notation. Wikipedia explains that a colour is written with three values. The first is blackness, its likeness to the black elementary colour. The second is chromaticness, its likeness to the strongest colour of that hue. The third is the hue itself, its likeness to one or two of the chromatic elementary colours. Whatever is left after blackness and chromaticness is read as whiteness.

In practice the code looks like S 2030-Y90R, the example Wikipedia gives for a light, pinkish red. The first pair of digits is the blackness and the second pair the chromaticness; after the hyphen, Y90R means a yellow that leans heavily towards red. Greys, blacks and whites carry the letter N in place of a hue, as in S 9000-N, a near-complete black. Swedish Wikipedia notes that the system needs no physical samples to be understood: a trained reader can picture a colour from its code alone.

The letter S at the front matters. Wikipedia says it shows that a colour belongs to the current version of the NCS standard, and Swedish Wikipedia ties it to the second edition of the standardised atlas. The atlas illustrates the system at regular steps of blackness, chromaticness and hue, with manufacturing tolerances set for each printed sample, so a code and a swatch can be checked against each other.

The Swedish flag is Wikipedia’s worked example. Its yellow is given as NCS 0580-Y10R, a strong yellow with a slight orange tinge, and its blue as NCS 4055-R95B, a somewhat dark blue with a very slight purple tinge.

Standards bodies adopted the notation. Wikipedia says NCS was developed into the Swedish national colour standard by the Swedish Standards Institute (SIS) in 1979, with an atlas made for the purpose. It became the reference norm for colour designation in Norway in 1984, in Spain in 1994 and in South Africa in 2004. The atlas was revised along the way: Wikipedia records additions in 1984, a second edition of the NCS colour samples in 1995 and a further extension in 2004.

Wikipedia says the atlas is marketed by NCS Colour AB in Stockholm, and that NCS is also the name of the company that sells the products illustrating the system.

A notation that became a product line.

A colour system or a paper mill shows its identity in places a consumer brand rarely has to think about. The first is the swatch book or fan deck: a bound set of printed chips or strips, each carrying a reference code, that a designer can hold against a sample or pass to a printer. Its binding, typography and order of colours are often the most widely handled object a colour company makes.

The second surface is naming. A colour name or a paper name has to be distinct, easy to say and stable enough to sit in a specification, a print order and a design file for years. Numbers and codes do the precise work, while names give a range a voice.

Third come sample packs and promotional books. Paper makers have long sent designers printed demonstrations showing how a stock takes ink, foil or embossing, and these pieces work as both catalogue and portfolio.

Finally, the paper itself can carry a mark. Watermarks, ream wrappers, box labels and swatch covers put a name in front of printers and buyers every time a sheet is unpacked, so they form part of the brand as much as any logo.

Scanners, atlases and new Standard colours.

NCS reaches designers through printed samples and, increasingly, through devices and software that connect a real-world colour to a code.

One of those tools drew press attention in 2010. Cool Hunting reported on 25 October 2010 that the Scandinavian Colour Institute had released the NCS Colour Scan 2.0, a handheld device that scans a colour from any surface and returns the closest NCS notation within seconds. It described a zoom function, a colour screen with crosshairs for isolating small areas of a pattern, and a built-in voice recorder for tagging colours to recall later in the studio. For each colour, it said, the scanner also gives CMYK, RGB and Lab values for use in graphics and CAD software, and it works with the company’s online three-dimensional colour application for building colour combinations. Cool Hunting set the device beside Pantone’s new colour-matching device of the time, Capsure.

The colour samples themselves were updated in 2023. In a partnership article published by Dezeen on 23 November 2023, NCS Colour said it had added new low-chromatic colours to the NCS Standard range, and said its colour chart had last been updated in 2004. The company said the additions were developed with an international community of designers and architects, and sorted them into four groups: White Delight, a set of pastel tints; Blackish Elegance, dark colours meant to set off lighter details; Great Greys, between beige and grey; and Nordic Midtones, which NCS Colour said were meant to evoke Nordic light. The company said it had also updated its tools that carry Standard samples, naming the NCS Index, NCS Atlas, NCS Block, NCS Album and NCS Box. The article quoted product manager Ingela Koski-Vähälä and chief executive Elin Askfelt.

The name appears in every code. Wikipedia’s examples are written as “NCS S 1070-Y10R” or “NCS 0580-Y10R”, so each specification carries the three letters along with the colour it describes.

For a design guide, NCS shows how a colour company can build its brand on a way of describing colour, so that its notation, more than any swatch, carries the name into other people’s work. Compare Pantone, another company that names colours with numbered references, and RAL, the German colour register. For this guide we use elementary yellow, red and blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep NCS’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.