The service being used is the original ai file is exported as JPEG so the marketing director can upload the JPEGs to a service that makes business cards out of JPEGs. I think its called YouPrint (ideally not a choice of mine).
Its a dark background with small white text she added. So the dark navy (originally Pantone 2766 C) is a mere image of what it should be. In this case the Pantone is represented in the JPEG that is then printed.
There were some registration issues kinda looked like magenta dust appeared on some first round prints before the printer warmed up.
I just looked at YouPrint’s website. As usual with these places, there’s practically no technical information. I couldn’t even find information about bleeds or resolution. It might be there, but it wasn’t obvious.
The site accepts JPEG, TIFF, and PDF files, which makes me wonder why your marketing supervisor chose JPEG. I would have chosen PDF to preserve the vector data for their RIP to rasterize at its preferred resolution. She chose JPEG, which means it was rasterized at whatever resolution she specified and, even worse, was subjected to lossy compression, which isn’t a good thing to do to type.
Reversing small type out of a dark 4-color background is almost always best avoided. Not only does it invite registration issues, it risks dot gain filling in the type.
Wow thanks for looking into it! I thought it seemed a little too convenient to be true, I’ll be sure to avoid them then.
So do most designers tend to just go with CMYK when printing rather than using Pantones? I find it so depressing if I want to use, say, a vibrant green in any branding… as it means it’ll just never work in print (at least not in cmyk anyway)
You can absolutely 100% use Pantones in all your work.
There are printers out there that specialise in printing Pantone colours.
You might pay a bit more - but you get what you pay for.
Pantone colours are not a direct conversion to CMYK so there will always be a colour shift.
And some colours will not be reproducable in CMYK.
It’s just something to be aware of.
You can get your jobs printed in CMYK and with 6 spot colours if you want.
there are 10 colour printing presses.
But mostly for small runs of 1-3 colour printing of pantone colours printing companies will have dedicated smaller stations to accommodate people - using possibly a GTO or similar.
Brading is a huge business. And I’ve often sent off stationery sets of pantone to be all printed in there 1000’s for big companies.
If you’re not printing 1000’s then consider working in CMYK as digital prints under a run of a 1000 are typically more cost efficient than printing them litho.
It’s highly important to discuss all options with your print vendor.
That’s why I prefer to stay with local printers and avoid online printing services.
One huge pitfall a colleague of mine made was that they sent off 10,000 compliment slips to be printed litho using Spot colours - and then he ran off the 1000 letter heads, and the 100 each of each business card on a digital printer in the office.
When the Comp slips came back - there was no way the pantone would match the digital print job he did.
he had to scrap the 1000 LHs and 100 of each of the business cards.
He contacted the litho company and they agreed to print them for free on this occasion. Which was nice of them.
Morale of the story, don’t mix your print suppliers. Send all to the same printer - or you’ll get a shitshow returned you.
I love getting feedback where a client says, “Out of all the collateral we had printed for the show, how come you were the only one to consistently hit our brand colors?”
The better part is when they remember it next time.
I had a gimp of a manager a few years ago; he split a high-profile FSDU order (and I mean a multi-billion company global company), it was 100,000s to be shipped all over the world.
He split them amongst different printers. Same PDF.
We had to get samples to show them they wanted to see about 50 lined up together.
He only got samples of 5 from each person who printed them. So he’d have 50 samples to photograph.
Well - they didn’t match in colour at all.
10 different printers - 10 different colour outcomes.
I don’t do those quantities but you gotta put at least a delta-e on things like that.
In the stuff I do, I can, and do, usually cross 3 or 4 print vendors for large projects but they are all fully vetted for color control, quality and delivery.
Don’t forget online - matching your corporate colours in RGB is another minefield, although most people are happy to get ‘close enough’ because different monitors display colours differently. I have seen / created Corporate Identity Guides which specify colours for the same logo in CMYK, RGB and Spot colours - all of which are different.
I know I’m veering off onto a tangent here, but the two of you got me thinking about something semi-related.
I have mixed feelings about official brand colors. On the one hand, they help create a cohesive and recognizable corporate identity. On the other hand, strict adherence to color specifications can be detrimental to what works best for a given design.
There’s a middle ground that is more appropriate. Brand colors should play an important role, but they often work best when brand standards can be judiciously modified on a case-by-case basis to achieve the best results for the job in question.
Too many brand managers, I think, are like anal-retentive copy editors who are more concerned with adherence to grammatical and style conventions than with the message being communicated.
For example, if Pantone 185 (bright red) is the company color, there may be instances when toning down that red just a bit will work and look best without sacrificing the relationship between the general color and the organization.
However, I’m not saying that maintaining a spot-on color match isn’t often necessary, as in adjacent components in a trade show booth. What I am saying is that what works best should be the goal, and what works best sometimes needs to deviate from the official standards.
I’m working on a fall-oriented recreation publication for a municipality in Oregon. The city’s official colors are a kelly green and a turquoise color. A permissible secondary color is violet. They’re sticklers for using these exact colors, but making them the dominant colors, as their brand guidelines specify, will compromise the fall personality they’re aiming to achieve.
B, that attitude toward Pantone matches develops with experience. I have several designer clients that, at the beginning, were all about spot matching accurately on far too many spot colors (these are large projects where the prints are usually a lot of one-offs.)
Over the years, for some of them, it has become more about a cohesive look. I think one needs to develop the confidence in their expertise in order to accept anything other than a perfect match.
As for brand managers and their swatch decks, we call them The Logo Police and are far more associated with the trade show and live theatre environment. We do our very best to give them accurate material.
Likewise, a designer needs to have the experience necessary to intentionally deviate from the standards when warranted to achieve a cohesive look.
In several of the brand standard manuals I’ve written over the years, I’ve included a loophole.
I can’t remember the exact wording, but it had something to do with the purpose of the standards being to establish a professional, cohesive, recognizable look. But in those instances where thoughtful deviations from the standards were warranted due to practical limitations or aesthetic concerns by a professional designer, case-by-case exceptions were acceptable as long as doing so furthered the best possible outcome.
I worried that the loophole created an all-purpose excuse for anyone to do whatever they wanted, but I don’t remember any problems. Half the organizations I worked with paid little attention to them anyway. Others were literally written into state government administrative code, which always tickled me as in, by law, you must use this typeface and no other.
