Celebrating 80 years

NCS Colour was founded in 1945, marking eight decades of innovation in colour communication.

Over the years, the NCS System has become a fundamental tool in colour communication. Developed by scientists, the system was created to meet the need for a reliable and practical way to define and reproduce colours the way humans perceive them. Today, the NCS System is used globally in design, architecture, coatings and manufacturing industry, setting the standard for colour communication with its accuracy and ease of use. From its early beginnings, the NCS System has grown into a central part of the modern colour world.

- Begründer: Farbe-Forscher Anders Hård, Psychologe Lars Sivik und Physiker Gunnar Tonnquist.

- Grundlage: Das einzige Farbsystem, das auf der menschlichen Wahrnehmung von Farbe basiert.

- Gründungsjahr: 1945 als T. Palmer AB

- 2010: Wurde zu NCS Farbe

- Einführung des NCS Systems: 1979 mit dem ursprünglichen NCS-Atlas, einschließlich 1,450 NCS-Standardfarben.

- NCS-Standardfarben heute: 2,050

Making the Natural Colour System commercially available was an important step towards enabling universal colour communication. In 1945, the company that would later be renamed NCS Colour was founded.

As colour became increasingly available and important in daily life during the 1950s and 1960s, the demand for both research and education grew in parallel. Scientific study provided the knowledge base, while education ensured that designers, architects, and industry professionals could apply this knowledge in practice. 

When the NCS System launched in 1979 with the now-iconic NCS Atlas, it marked a breakthrough: the first and only colour system based entirely on how humans perceive colour.  

The long and rigorous research approach ensured that the NCS System could act as a reproducible and universally understood “language of colour” across materials, industries, and cultural contexts.

The first NCS Atlas was a complete, perception-based colour system, presented in a collection of 1,412 precisely defined standard colours, ready for consistent application in design, architecture, manufacturing, and education. 

During the 1950s, the Colour in the Home initiative, developed with IKEA, led Hesselgren and Johansson to create a dedicated colour department. This department launched one of the first commercial colour schools and educational programmes, involving up to 20 designers, and laid the foundations for modern colour expertise. 

These early educational activities evolved directly from the same research traditions that drove the development of the Natural Colour System. They became the backbone of what is now the NCS Colour Academy, where the principles discovered through decades of research are still taught and applied worldwide. 

In the 1960s, the Swedish Colour Centre Foundation set out to transform the Natural Colour System from a theoretical model into a scientifically validated standard. The research was led by Anders Hård (colour researcher), Lars Sivik (psychologist), and Gunnar Tonnquist (physicist).    

Together, they combined expertise in perception, physics, and colour measurement to conduct extensive psychophysical experiments, analysing tens of thousands of visual assessments to precisely define the system’s parameters. Nearly two decades of research and refinement resulted in the practical application on the Natural Colour system.

It must be possible to produce the same colour on different products from different manufacturers. Producing the exact colour is crucial, as it can be for anything from the colour of emergency exit signs to the colour of medical needles to the colour of our Swedish flag. What these examples have in common is that the colour must be the same regardless of manufacturer for people to recognise them. This is made possible by national and international standards that authorities and industries mutually agree on and that describe the colours precisely (SIS, ISO, CEN and CIE are some of the most important standardisation organisations).

To make colour decisions we must be able to accurately define and communicate colours, so that we can ensure that produced colours match the intended colours. To do this, we must understand how we perceive colour. When the NCS System was launched in 1979, it was a scientifically based colour notation system based on how we perceive colour visually. It allows us to define all colour perceivable by humans, making it possible to define and communicate colour in a revolutionising way that ensures accurate results.

NCS is a standardised colour communication system with accurate colour notations and colour samples that provides the industry with the tools they need to always produce the right colour. The NCS System and its colour samples are standardised in Sweden and multiple other countries. Furthermore, the NCS Notations are used in countless standards and instructions worldwide for accurate colour specification.