According to Pantone, this latest expansion of the Pantone Plus Series - to 1,677 colours in total, has been driven by a rise in sales – particularly to the design community.

Pantone European sales director Paul Graham said that the colour specialist had experienced "significant double digit sales growth" since it revamped its Pantone Matching System (PMS) in 2010 with the launch of the Pantone Plus Series.

This growth has primarily been driven by designers, rather than Pantone's traditional print industry customer base, and it is these customers that are driving the continued expansion of the PMS.

"We think that 70-75% of the guides we sell go to the design channel, rather than print, these days," said Graham. "So, increasingly it's becoming the palette of choice for designers rather than only a spot colour palette for printers.

"Designers are driven by brands and brands want new things – so what we're trying to respond to is the desire from designers to fill out the colour palettes even more to give them even more choice."

The new colours were selected by the Pantone Colour institute in New York, which is headed up by executive director Lea Eiseman – a world authority on colour trends, based on future colour trends in fields such as fashion and interiors.

"In terms of the colours we've added, there's quite a lot of pastel shades in there, there's a few quite strong colours – almost going towards neon type colours, and a fair few midtones as well, so it's fairly well distributed around the overall pallete," said Graham.

"A lot of these colours are drawn from the Goe System, which wasn't as well-adopted as we'd hoped because brands tended to want to stick with the PMS numbers that they knew and the Goe System was perhaps too big a leap in one go."

The 336 new colours will help integrate the Pantone Goe palette with the PMS by adding the four extra base colours from Goe to the Pantone Plus Series, bringing the total number of base colours to 18; Goe had 10 base colours in total although six of these were already shared with Pantone Plus.

"We're effectively bringing the best elements of the two systems together," said Graham. "What was interesting was even with the 224 colours we added last time there were still areas where we were underrepresented, such as in the reds and so on, so we've tried to fill the palette out but also to predict a little bit where colours are going."

One previous example of Pantone's successful mapping of future colour requirements amongst designers was in its addition of pastel and neon colours to the PMS in 2010, which precipitated to an extent the explosion in neon and pastels ever since.

The 336 new colours, all of which have been formulated with a consistent ink-film thickness, will be available as a supplement for a limited time to allow users of existing Pantone guides to update their products.

All new orders for core publications will ship with the 336 colour supplements. However, the Colour Bridge supplements for coated and uncoated papers will not be available until June.

For more information visit www.pantone.com/plus