Against the grain

I’m sure other Aussies would agree that there’s no better place to pinpoint the importance of colour management for branding than spending a Saturday night seeking sustenance at a West London gastro pub after the kitchen has closed. Ask any other Antipodeans in the area and I’m sure they’d agree (they'll be behind the bar).

All you want is a burger and chips (although, as it’s a London gastro pub, you would’ve had to settle for the pancetta-wrapped rissole with goat’s cheese, rocket salad and hollandaise on a semi-dried tomato and olive ciabatta with a side of paprika frites). But the chef's gone home, so instead it’s crisps and a beer. You sit down at the table, pint of proper British lager in one hand (which just happens to have a map of Oz on it), packet of Salt & Vinegar crisps in the other. You reach into the pack, pull out a crisp, put it in your mouth and…

… Prawn Cocktail!

You see, not only does the water flush the other way Down Under, but we are also certified to a different standard for our potato crisp colour space. Salt & vinegar is pink. Ready Salted flavour is blue. Chicken flavour is green. Marmite flavour is… well, Vegemite. Like so much branding, the connection is deep-seated and unconscious, built up through years of television advertising and hiding your lunchbox from the playground bully. For brand owners, these colour connections are sales and marketing dynamite. For printers (especially those looking for corporate clients), they provide a strong impetus to adhere to strict colour management principles.

Pantone has long been the dominant source for standardised colour matching. But even Pantone colours are less than standard, with different tones requiring an individual approach depending on substrate or ink formulation. Colour shift is also an issue, whether it be from mechanical variations during printing, ageing of the printed product, atmospheric stimulus or accidentally leaving your swatch book sitting on top of the radiator.

For the August issue of PrintBuyer, I’ll be looking at colour and brand management from the perspective of printers’ customers. This doesn't only apply to those obvious business giants and their corporate colours – colour management is a way to maintain brand integrity across all printed collateral. Think about a global auction house that wants to send the same fine art catalogue to a gallery owner in Kuala Lumpur and an art dealer in Prague. The printer will be different. The paper and ink may be different. The only constant among the variables is the £2m Monet on page four. Colour management can be the difference between continuity of collateral and a cancelled print contract.

But corporate colours make for the most obvious and simple examples of best practice. Or, in the case of those digital press manufacturers that can’t actually print their own logo with the inkset in their own kit, less-than-best practice. Pedantic? A colour shift of a few delta-E might not seem like an, ahem, hue-ge problem, but brand owners splash out massive sums on their corporate identities.

Not only do colours need to match across varied substrates, but also under many lighting conditions. To put it in plain English, metamerism (as it’s officially known) is a complex undertaking to create metameric matches of tristimulus values regardless of an image’s spectral emittance curve.

Punters too are canny colour customers. Upon returning from Drupa with a head full of printing technology and a belly full of that German favourite, long-life milk, I headed to the local Sainsbury’s for a half pint of some fresh stuff of the green-lidded variety. At my local supersize supermarket, I wandered in a daze up and down the dairy aisle, which in length terms is on par with Heidelberg’s exhibition stand. My vacant stare may have looked like the side-effects of a fortnight in the Messe Düsseldorf, but I was actually just plain lost in the hunt for semi-skimmed. I nearly cut my losses to take my business elsewhere. But, at the last moment, all became clear. Cunningly, the retail giant had undertaken a storewide product redesign – hiding in plain sight was the green milk, with a label more Pantone 3405 than the expected PMS 354.

At least, I assume Sainsury’s had overhauled their product design. Or maybe they just left the labels on top of the radiator.