Printing on plastic

[Eggles1]

The Marketing Manager at work was disappointed with the colours that our corporate PMS colours turned out when printed on various promotional items made of plastic e.g. soft plastic used for showbags, hard plastic for water bottles. She was told that it was impossible to get a good colour match for our two corporate Pantone colours (both Pantones have pretty good CMYK equivalents) when printed on plastic. I know nothing about non-paper printing, and wondered if anyone here had any experience with printing on plastics, if the inks used are different to those used in paper printing (which could well be the case) and whether these inks have Pantone equivalents.

[Logo-Mechanix]

I work at my fulltime for a promotional product company. The only reason I could think of is sometimes when you imprint on an item such as plastic and that item is a color itself you have to imprint white first and run your colors on top of the white which could be costly due to the registration and not everyone offers this as an option. Usually these items are screen printed though so matching your colors should not be problem.

[patkennedy78]

Looks like I'll be the 1st to say it, did you talk to the printer first? A PMS Color is a PMS Color, but if you print it on glossy paper vs black plastic, it is going to change how it looks.

I had to design a label to be directly printed on a white bucket. It was 5 color PMS job, on a "white substrate", read white plastic bucket. In the production specs it said that colors may vary because of this. So I called them up and talked about how much they vary and what not, so I knew what to expect, and passed that on to my boss. The colors came out slightly lighter, but unless you knew what the "Pantone Yellow C" swatch looked like, you wouldn't notice the difference.

Long story short, yes the color will look different, but you should be aware of that before you get your job back from the printer.

[Logo-Mechanix]

I have had similar experiences Pat and the variation like you said is usually so slight it is not noticable. Of course except the time the printer tried to print my customers mainly yellow logo on a blue banner (with no white behind it) and was mad when we rejected the job with the GREEN logo on it.

[Silence04]

i screen print on plastic all the time... and Yes, a PMS color can be very difficult to match. there are a lot of variables that will effect your color from the type of plastic to Coextrusion, to Color.

for example, we had an critical orange PMS that we were printing on a Coex plastic, but it kept coming out much darker than it would on paper... so we ended up using a florecent orange pms just to net out the original PMS we wanted.

thats why you should have them run pms color samples on the pastic before you goto print.

[Eggles1]

LogoM - one job was printed on white plastic (the bag), the other on semitransparent plastic (the bottle). So presumably the substrate colour should not have affected the printed colour?

Since you and Silence04 both work in promotional printing, please tell me if the inks used are the same as those used for print, and if not, do they have pre-determined Pantone equivalents? Or do you have to try and somehow match the inks you use with Pantone swatches?

Pat - we're talking a corporate mentality here - the policy is that all print jobs are subject to three quotes and the purchasing dept always picks the cheapest. I have no say in the matter other than drawing up the quote specs.

Slience 04 - I have no idea what 'coextrusion' means.

[Logo-Mechanix]

We don't do the printing where I am we job it out to various suppliers and have never really had a problem with matching color. I set the art up the same way I would for silk screening and although I have seen slight variations in color they are usually minimal. I would call your supplier and ask how they are printing these as I am sure there is more than one method.

[Silence04]

Slience 04 - I have no idea what 'coextrusion' means.

it's a process they do to the plastic that makes it more porous, almost makes it feel like rubber.

[Logo-Mechanix]

I have sent our engravable plastic to local silk screeners before and it always worked for things like signage or name badges, and they always matched the colors of various logos with minmal problems.

[Danger_Mouse]

I would talk to your printer. Ultimately its there responsibility to match the pantone. We do the same sort of thing at our company as we sublimate onto fabric. Get PMS numbers to match all the time.....we create a color swatch and either get the customer to approve it.

There ARE a few pantones we have troubles matching, but not many.
Outputs are also affected by Inks, humidity, wether the whole run is printed on one or many printers, and temperature (if not in controlled environment).
If a pantone you told the printer to match isn't matching....its the printers fault. Even if it was a PMS they couldn't match, they should inform the customer before a print run. Bad for business and too exspensive otherwise.

[Eggles1]

Thanks for all the feedback. Next time I will try to be more proactive, even if this isn't the way our business works i.e. I am not allowed to get involved much with the printing process - I just hand over the files, which are always perfect of course!! I had to fight to even get told who had won the print job so I could contact them and ask if they preferred packaged native files or a PDF, and if PDF, what sort. I also had to ask to get copies of the printed results. Odd way of runnning things I know, but I suspect my predecessors didn't know all that much about the printing process.

[urstwile]

Eggles1,

Any way you can discuss some of these issues with the Marketing Director at your job? Explain to them that it's important for you to speak to the specific vendor to find out what you need to do with your files to ensure that the result is what you require.

Bottom line is, as perfect as you may think your files are, they're really not perfect unless they play nicely in the sandbox with the workflow and/or methods that the vendor uses to output the file, and this will vary from vendor to vendor, so there's no universal "perfect". Which is why it's always important to talk to the printer outputting your job.

[Eggles1]

I agree with you - I have instigated a number of changes to the way things were done previously, and they are working well, as long as it is a print job on paper. I now get notified of who wins the quote bid, and know the requirements/specifications of the various paper printers we use and can prepare files accordingly (e.g. one likes PDFs, another likes native packages, another likes PDFs prepared to their own joboptions, etc). But this printing on plastic was a first in the year I've worked there, and the results were not what I expected. But we learn from our mistakes and I will ensure that if in the future we have other printing on plastic done, I will insist there are a lot more questions asked. The main reason for the original question was to ascertain if in fact it was reasonable to expect printing a spot colour on white plastic should be able to produce the correct colour. I understand that if you have a decent printer, the answer is yes.

[urstwile]

Good luck! I always try to make sure to contact a vendor for a new process, so hopefully you can get more information the next time out, so you get more assured results.

I hate that bureaucracy thing, it's lame.