History of Dane Color

Whoever you are and wherever you live, the chances are that you will have seen examples of fluorescent technology at one time or another. Fluorescent pigments and inks are up to 3 times brighter and are noticed much more quickly than conventional colours. Although you can see many examples of fluorescent products and applications around the world, our company specializes only in the actual colour (powder pigment or ink) that is used to make them look bright.

Dane Color UK Ltd., selling through its brands Sterling Colour and Swada is one of the world’s principal suppliers of Daylight Fluorescent Pigments and Inks.

We offer our products across the globe both directly and through an international network of distributors.

Our company offers the widest range of some of the brightest, cleanest high-performance colours available on the market today.

Through investment in research and development we constantly look at ways both to improve the quality of our ranges and to remain at the forefront of fluorescent colour technology. Our policies of continuous product development have resulted in several new high-performance ranges which today are some of the most successful products that we have ever had.

We are also committed to offering a high level of technical support and customer service and are pleased to work with customers new and old through our network.

Particular attention to Regulatory Affairs means that we can offer products in compliance with the most far-reaching range of standards on a national and global basis both currently and in anticipation of new demands.

History of Dane Color UK Ltd.

Dane Color UK Ltd. owes its heritage to the original Dane & Company which started as a printing ink company in East London in 1853. Initially supplying the wide variety of presses in the capital city, Dane & Co. went on to earn a fine reputation as a specialist ink company of international renown.

Our legacy includes the first successful application of daylight fluorescent technology outside the USA in 1950 and soon afterwards in 1953 Dane & Co. created the brand SWADA, being an amalgam of SWitzer And DAne. The Switzer brothers were the inventors of Daylight Fluorescent inks and pigments and went on to establish DayGlo Color Corporation. The well-established Dane company was able to access a wide variety of markets around the world.

The Dane Group of Companies went on to buy the business of Sterling Colour in 1981 and completed its purchase of Nova-Glo in 1999 before Dane’s fluorescent business was itself acquired by RPM in 2006.

Dane remained in Stratford, London until 2005 when it moved to Stalybridge near Manchester.

Since July 2018, Dane Color and Radiant Color, two world class fluorescent manufacturing companies and both wholly owned subsidiaries of RPM, operating in the Day-Glo Group, combined resources. The manufacture of all products produced at Dane Color, UK, is transferred to either Day-

Glo Color Corp, Cleveland USA or Radiant Color NV, Belgium.

Technology of Daylight Fluorescent Colour

Dane Color’s Daylight Fluorescent Pigments and Inks can appear up to three times brighter than conventional pigments. Unlike some phosphors and other luminescent colours, both incident and emitted radiation are in visible spectrum, they are not dependent on UV (black) light and are not radioactive. Though Daylight Fluorescent colours may be enhanced by UV light they contain no inorganic phosphors (e.g. zinc sulphide) and do not “glow in the dark”. They do however appear brighter than normal reflective colours in all daylight conditions and can be very effective in low-light conditions.

Daylight Fluorescence occurs when higher energy, short wavelength light is absorbed and instantaneously emitted at wavelengths longer than those of the absorption. This is known as Stokes Shift, defined as the separation (in nm) between the longest wavelength absorption band and the shortest wavelength fluorescence emission band. So, blue light is reflected as yellow or red light, yellow light is reflected as red light and the addition of the reflected light components can bring brightness up to three times as that of conventional pigments where a lot of the energy is merely absorbed.

Dane Color’s Daylight pigments consist of a fluorescent dye dissolved in a solid polymer matrix. The polymer matrix can be thermoset or thermoplastic, depending on end use but in all cases the dye is fixed within the polymer, allowing it to be used in the manner of a traditional pigment.

Dane Color’s liquid inks and concentrates are based on related polymer chemistry but the very finely divided fluorescent particles are formed within the ink medium, maximizing the colour and brightness.

Dyes are used singly or in combination with other dyes and pigments to produce a range of bright colours across the spectrum.