News

Late last year in China, it was a battle of the reds. Back in 2005, there was the war of the oranges. And right now in Australia, the fight has turned purple. Be it Pepsi's shrewd use of rival Coca-Cola's iconic colour on drinks cans ahead of Beijing 2008 or mobile phone provider Orange's action against EasyJet over its eponymous hue, colour management and brand integrity are serious matters. At the present moment, it would be impossible to mention global confectionery giant Cadbury's colour management strategy without reference to its ongoing legal battle in Australia with home-grown chocolatier Darrell Lea over the use of the colour purple.

Corporate hues are an example of the huge value buyers place on colour, but maintaining brand integrity isn’t limited to specific shades. Colour management offers a way to enforce a message of quality through consistency, not only across multiple printed products, but throughout different processes and at international print sites. Grant Deudney, print buyer from global auction house Christies, procures around 650 international colour catalogues each year from printers in seven or eight countries. With a range of images that could include anything from a £20m to £30m Monet to a teddy bear in a collectors’ sale, good colour management is paramount.

Perfect colour match
Aligning a single brand colour within acceptable tolerances – measured in delta-E – may seem straightforward. However Alan Dresch of consultancy Mellow Colour says even tiny differences in tones can make people question if the product is genuine, which reflects badly on the company. He explains that if there are very small differences in a green, for instance, like a Jaguar or Land Rover green – and it only needs to be a delta-E of three wrong – people pick it up immediately.

There’s a minefield of potential problems lying between the brand owner and the perfect colour match. Brochures, for example, are often produced in short runs from multiple printers to keep stock levels down. Dresch adds: They could well end up on the same brochure rack and you pick out differences immediately when you put colours side-by-side.

Multiple substrates are another problem area. You could have a campaign, such as in the music or games industry, where you’d have a plastic DVD or CD case and a poster and a cardboard packet, says Dresch. If the colours are not the same, it looks shabby. Or worse yet the goods could be mistaken for counterfeit products.

But even consistently procuring from the same plant doesn’t always amount to consistency of product. Chris Jones of colour specialist Targetcolour says: It’s a major misconception that print from the same printer and the same press will look the same. While the goal of standards is to set a transparent benchmark, they don’t do away with the multitude of variables. The ink weight of different spot colours, and the impact of consumables and hardware, throws up an array of different dot gain characteristics. How that gain looks on proof may well be different to the values picked up through spectrophotometer.

Another hurdle arises with delta-E values. These figures take into account the average of three distinct channels of colour – ‘L’ for lightness, and ‘a’ and ‘b’ for colour opponent dimensions – expressed in the device-independent colour space L*a*b*. This popular system for setting how much of a delta-E variation is acceptable does not, in fact, always provide uniform results. Because it is an average, two different colours with significant variations in the ‘a’ or ‘b’ channels, for example, could still fall within the same delta-E tolerance, despite looking noticeably different to the human eye. This should be approached with particular caution for certain shades, such as greys and pastel colours.

Substrates also play a role in a colour’s final outcome, as Dresch pointed out in terms of CD and DVD cases. Ink is another obvious variable, especially as the solvent can evaporate over the course of a single run, leaving a higher concentration of ink and producing a darker printed product.

Passing the buck
Who is responsible for getting it right? Jones says it’s unclear, and the buck can be passed along the supply chain from the brand owner to its internal print buyer or external print manager, who in turn puts the onus on to the printer. The only scapegoat left then would be the printer’s own suppliers: press manufacturers or consumables vendors.

David Ward, managing director of ink supplier Stehlin Hostag, says: In the past, the onus has been put on the printer. It has been a case of ‘I want Pantone 289 and that’s what I’ll get’ and there’s almost been a bit of an ignorance of all the variables and pitfalls that the printer has to manage.

So how culpable is an ink firm in ensuring a quality outcome? From an ink supplier point of view, we’re the specialists so we feel the onus is on us to quite a degree, explains Ward. But pointing the finger of blame doesn’t achieve anything. Ward stresses the importance of relationships: We encourage our customers to get their customers to talk about this, he says.

Communication is key
Rather than print buyers demanding suppliers take the customer is king approach, a better motto might be communication is key. Standards, profiles and tolerances are only half the battle; for real victory, all sides need to play their part. Paul Samuels, technical director from repro house Zebra, thinks firms such as his should also take the burden of due care on their shoulders. I feel that if you employ a repro house and printer to make your brand work, it’s the responsibility of both.

Perfect print also means business for Christie’s Deudney. Colour calibration offers a sound platform for consistency, so the auction house puts its worldwide fleet of Epson proofers through a certification process on a weekly basis, while all colour conversions are done through Dalim Twist. The firm puts printers through their paces with the ‘Christies print test’ before adding them to the books.

Targetcolour’s Jones advocates joined-up thinking: I’d love to see a holistic approach and get everyone in the supply chain to buy in. His colleague Malcolm Mackenzie describes colour management as a chain, for which their firm identifies and rectifies weak links through colour management audits.

These health-checks take into account a company’s policies on handling a key colour throughout the workflow, including testing the hardware and software settings, as well as users’ understanding of colour control. Mackenzie adds that best practice is very often more a question of training and education.

The supply chain involves a host of varied stakeholders with different levels of understanding. Production can create its own tricky variables. But the fact remains that throughout a product’s lifecycle from owner to consumer, there is just one constant: the brand itself.

Managing colour competently shrinks the margin for error or disagreement. Stehlin’s Ward says: When you start measuring colour and talking about it in these terms, it becomes very black and white. Which can only be a good thing if your corporate identity depends on a red. Or an orange. Or a purple.