Company makes their own Pantone System??

[aseverson]

Is this advisable? The company created their own "pantone" formulas to use company wide in order to get consistent printing throughout their many offices. The idea sounds good, except when clients provide specific Pantone (universally accepted) spot colors and things have to be converted to the company's generic "pantone" formulas. Things get lost in the shuffle and blacks turn blu-ish/purple and teals baby blue.

Any knowledge on this would be greatly appreciated!

[morea]

is the company a printer or a client?

The point of the pantone system is supposed to be to provide the consistency that the company is looking for... I realize that there can be slight variations in color between print runs, but I would think that since pantone is such a widely recognized standard, they would really be better off using recognized pantone formulas.

The way we always handled jobs when color matching was a critical issue was to simply include a note to the pressman right on our job tickets "Color is critical; ink must be run to chart."

[aseverson]

the company is the one i work for. they do tradeshows and conventions and have many inhouse print shops across the nation. this was their solution for outputting consistent color company wide. has anyone heard of a company doing this?

[idaho]

this was their solution for outputting consistent color company wide. has anyone heard of a company doing this?

Um... wouldn't using the Pantone color system provide consistent color formulas company-wide? That's the whole point of Pantone's system.

Regardless of whether you are using a custom color system or Pantone's system you are still going to get some variations in your final colors. You are not going to get exact colors across the board. There are too many variables (i.e. different presses at each location, different press operators, different environments in terms of temperature and humidity which might affect your paper).

I would say that unless you have identical setups in every location including: color calibration, brands of inks, etc., your companies "custom" colors isn't going to work any better than Pantone. Besides, you are adding extra man-hours to convert from the customers Pantone choices to your companies specific choices.

Sticking with Pantone is definately a better way to go.

[D-Frag]

When I worked at my old print shop, we actually had our own color guide that was specifically calibrated to our machines. Its not rare to see this in shops. We also had PMS books of course, but when we needed to match to that we color corrected in the rip. We also did nothing but large format stuff, so no, its not that abnormal.

[aseverson]

thanks so much for your input everyone. to be safe, i think i will continue to use the universal pantone system but specify files must be converted to company profiles before outputting to any of our company machines. therefore, when things are printed through outsourcing, the profiles will still match the universal system and client-specified colors.

or else i will always request cmyk values from the client and just use those instead.

happy new year everyone!:D

[rickself]

I think it's a wonderful idea. Like we prepress people don't have enuf stuff to wallow through! Now we have a company that is going to tell me to change the way I've been doing things for EVER. Why oh why is my hair grey (that's Pantone 442)?

Change is good. So is hitting your thumb with a hammer (Pantone 268). Or stapling your finger to the roof (Pantone 185).

[Django]

Seems fine if you live in a bubble, but what happens when they do ned to go outside to another vendor. it's like if we all invented our own language, sure we can all talk amongst ourselves but not to anyone else until we read through the freakin translation book a few times.

[rockem]

Thats normal for a print shop, especially with large format like you said it was for, they will have their own chart that usually matches really good to a pms color. Their production artists will normally be doing changes to the files so you should just make sure you are letting them know which pantone colors go where and just use the pms swatches and they will make changes as needed. Especially if they are changing media, inks, etc. it will always change

[PrintDriver]

We call it 'charting' and it is normal. Especially for large format.
If you aren't going to use their specified charted colors, you could cause some grief if the standard pantone you select is out of gamut for their machines (happens every day here!). Your best option would be to request a chart, if there is one, and select your colors from that.