Dear brand owner, print buyer, designer. You are the guardian of your brand, your work, and you take your job seriously. You probably only accept minor color differences in print, you check this every time with your reference. But – and I really need to ask this – how well did you check your reference? Especially when your reference is a Pantone color guide?
And there is a good reason for this question: these color guides show differences between different editions. Even between different copies of one edition. And sometimes it can happen that the difference between the same Pantone number in two editions, is bigger than what you would accept from your printer.
Pantone is ambiguous in its communication. On their website, which is written with you in mind, they tell you that you can use your copy of the color guide as the ‘on-the-go reference’, that you can use it for press checks. But that’s NOT what Pantone tells printers: towards your print providers, they say that the physical color guides are NOT the reference. It’s the digital values in their database: the master data. And that probably is different from the color in your copy. Most of the time slightly different, but in some cases more different than the tolerance you demand from your print provider…
Check out the image below, which clearly shows this. The blue on the left is a measurement from a physical Pantone color guide. On the right is the ‘official’ value for that specific Pantone number. And as you can see: that’s a different blue. If you are picky, you would not accept a print job with that color, if you expect the blue on the left… But the blue on the right IS the correct Pantone 072C…
You see the problem?
It probably happens quite often that a print buyer rejects a printed job based on his version of the color guide, even though it falls within the agreed tolerances compared to the official color, the master data. I was contacted some time ago by a mid-sized printing company (some 50 people) that had the spot ink – a near neutral – x custom made, based on the official values. But the customer rejected the job, because it looked different from their copy of the Pantone color guide…
The rejected job consisted of 100.000 high-end packages (luxuriously made of cardboard). Which was wasted. The company had to reprint everything at its own cost. With, on average, a operating profit margin in the lower single digits and the substrate itself already accounting for half the cost, that’s a financial disaster. Imagine how many profitable jobs they need to recover from this.
The only way to be sure the color you order is exactly the same as the one you saw when you picked it from a physical sample (like the Pantone color guide) is to measure that sample and use that measurement as your perfect reference. That’s the Project BBCG way. And if you don’t have the means to do that measurement yourself, ask your printer. He will be happy to help you!
PS: this is a shorter version of an article on insights4print.ceo.