#32: Rhapsody in (Ball) Blue (Part 1)

When Happens When Your Job Is To Actually See Color?

Pantone 3135. Otherwise known as “Ball blue,” a ubiquitous color found throughout Ball Corporation.

For more than 100 years, that distinctive blue shade defined the company’s brand, almost as much as the iconic script-lettering “Ball” made famous on its glass home canning jars.

Employee badges, company merch, PowerPoint templates, Ball websites – all featured Ball blue. You could find it on hundreds of items, with examples as small as business cards and as large as football-field-length stripes along plant exteriors.

Unfortunately, sometimes those items were the wrong color.

See, Ball blue was a bitch to reproduce. It wasn’t quite your basic blue, nor was it teal. Its uniqueness is one reason it became part of Ball’s brand.

The elusive “Ball blue,” a key part of Ball’s brand. The “C” means coated paper, on which color samples were often printed.

The blue came from the company’s early canning jars, which turned that now familiar tint during manufacturing due to certain impurities in its sand.