Because isn’t that what this is all about? Making your product look it’s absolute best?
Colour accuracy seems like such a simple concept; yet how many times have you ordered custom merch and received a product with incorrect ink colours?
This can be a nightmare for you, your brand, your deadlines, and your wallet (if the print shop isn’t willing to work with you to remedy the situation).
It’s also not a good situation for printers either - reprinting jobs costs time and money. The original job can be delayed, and can snowball into delaying other orders too; it’s not a good look!
Colour spectrum is a bit of a topic of discussion and it can be summed up quite simply:
The device/media you are viewing your design on will display colour differently than any other device/media will display it.
As you can imagine, this is a problem when us printers are trying to provide you with colour accurate designs.
There’s RGB, CMYK, HSB, and I’m sure there’s others but we see these three the most.
These are all good colour models to know and it will help us get close to your specific colour, but it’s not perfect for the reason stated above.
Is there a solution?
Along comes Lawrence Herbert, working for the Levine Bro’s advertising company in the 1950’s. Herbert used his chemistry knowledge to systematize and simplify the company's stock of pigments and production of coloured inks. He went on to later buy the company’s technological assets, renaming them “Pantone”.
The idea behind the PMS (Pantone Matching System) is to allow designers to "color match" specific colours when a design enters production stage, regardless of the equipment used to produce the colour. This system has been widely adopted by graphic designers and reproduction and printing houses.
Fast-forward to present day at Black Cat Studios. We have a fantastic PMS ink mixing system that allows us to accurately create any colour from the coated and uncoated libraries - it’s been a game changer for our team and clients!
Being able to confidently match your brand colours time and time again is the consistency we aim for.
However, making new colours for your orders every day of the week presents new challenges (nothing comes easy!).
Now loaded up with over 250 pots of Pantone colours (and more added daily) we have to store them and track their location on the shelves.
So what we’ve ended up with is a huge shelving system split into columns and rows, as well as a digital catalogue of the inks we have in-stock and their location on the shelves.
This was quite the process to get everything into a database, labeled, and organized; but what we have now is another tool in our toolbox that helps us print your orders faster, accurate, and with some of the highest quality inks that will make your designs look the best they’ve ever looked.
