Ensure Colour Consistency in Branding

Ian Paget: I've been aware of Pantone for years since I was first a graphic designer and I would have thought that most people listening would be aware of what Pantone is, But so that we provide some kind of context for listeners, would you mind briefly explaining what Pantone's all about?

Nicholas Bazarian: Sure. That's probably the most important question is what is this colour system? Pantone, at the highest level it's really a language of colour and it's a colour standard.

The key with Pantone colours is that they represent a selection of achievable ... Which means they're really physically reproducible colours for whatever material or substrate they are produced with or produce on. And so when we say Pantone, a lot of people think of one particular colour system. The Pantone matching system, which is most well known because it's used in graphic design.

But similarly there's actually an entire system for textile as well with those same qualities where it's physically achievable colours for textile. In this case cotton or nylon or polyester. And so this language becomes a way to communicate colour consistently from really the beginning of a design, the inspiration phase as we like to think about, all the way through to the final production of that colour. And keep the identity of that colour consistent.

Really without this language, the potential that somebody picking a colour and getting the final colour they expected in their final result, it's very low because colour tends to drift due to all of the different workflow steps involved in creating something.

Ian Paget: I think based on that, and it's one of the topics that I was really keen to speak with you about is, colour accuracy and the workflow that ideally graphic designers should be going through for consistency. This podcast is primarily around logo design and branding, there are a lot of companies out there that properly require colour consistency across the board and they would want it to be as accurate as possible.

So as a graphic designer using the Pantone system, what's the best workflow to run through so that you do have the best consistency from Pantone through to CMYK and RGB colour profiles?

Nicholas Bazarian: Sure. I think really first and foremost understanding that there's an entire workflow of colour from start to finish, from inspiration through to the final production. And then understanding at each of these different steps of the workflow the different things that you can do to control colour so that you get the result that you want. You almost have to start at the highest level and then drill down. So we can do that here.

Ian Paget: Yeah, sure. Okay.

Nicholas Bazarian: So to begin with if I was thinking about starting a new design or some new work for a customer or a client that was asking me for something, I'd want to understand exactly what it is that that logo or that design was going to be used for and where it was going to be used. If it's simply a colour that's going to exist in digital, it's never really going to be reproduced physically at some point, then the workflow becomes much shorter but there still are steps that you need to take to control it.

In most cases that colour is going to be physically reproduced. And so knowing that, you're really at the earliest step possible in your inspiration phase, if you can get to a physically achievable colour like Pantone, you're going to be best off with getting the best results.

So we typically think of this workflow almost like a left hand side and a right hand side and in the middle of it is a big roundabout. And so on the left hand side of this workflow you're doing sort of the inspirational work. You're talking to your clients, you're trying to get an understanding of what meaning they're going for, what mood. Maybe they have some preexisting colours but maybe they want to change them a little bit. You're really gathering information.

And at that point, we call that really inspiration and it kind of comes down to colour picking and just trying to figure out what the right colour is. There's a second step to this workflow which is, once you've sort of figured out what your colour is, really specifying it and then applying it to a design file so that it's now sort of built into the product that you're making. That's going from the first phase to really the second phase of this.

Once you start getting beyond what your final design file is, there becomes this handoff where if you're a graphic designer you might be going to a printer directly. You could be going to someone who's considered more of like a pre-press or pre-media where they're going to be preparing your design file to be produced.

And then from there once you're working with your printer there's a formulation step of colour, and then a final production run, or a final print run. This handoff, we typically talk about it as like a roundabout. So what happens is you'll hand something off. Maybe something in your design file wasn't clear. Maybe you didn't specify the colour in the right colour space. Maybe the profile wasn't there so the printer's not sure what they're trying to produce.

It causes this back and forth that wastes a lot of time and a lot of money. And so everything that you can do as a graphic designer early on to get to an achievable colour and have it controlled and have it specified, in this case like we say is a Pantone colour, the more likely you are to get the colour that your client picked or that you picked at the end of the day.

In the inspiration phase where Pantone typically comes in is we make these books of colour and I think a lot of your audience is probably familiar with the Pantone book. They're really like a physical reference to what the Pantone colour identity is.

So when you pick it from a book, you pick a Pantone colour from a book, you know that that colour is tied to a specific data point and that data point can be carried all the way through this workflow that we just described from inspiration into design and then over to formulation and the print and production run of that colour. So your first step is just physically picking a colour that you're comfortable with and then knowing that you sort of have that identity to go forward.

Ian Paget: I've recently actually upgraded my set of books and I was looking at the different options. It's the first time that I probably invested in a new set. The set that I did have was like 10 years old and obviously slightly faded. But I wasn't aware until recently what the colour bridge book is and I spoke to a couple of graphic design friends and they pointed out that the fact that the colour bridge version does have the Pantone and the closest CMYK match. So I think it'd be useful to also just explain what these different books are, because I know that there's a few different version out there. What's the difference between each of those?

Nicholas Bazarian: Absolutely. Colour for print in particular, it can be produced in a few different ways. Spot colour is where Pantone's history was really founded. With a spot colour ink, the ink and the colour itself that you've chosen is actually pre mixed before it goes on press. So it's a true colour that's applied. It's not mixed as it's going onto the press.

With spot colour you can get a much wider variety, a much wider gamut of colour at the end of the day. And so for designers, having more colour, having more vibrant colour, spot colour is really ... It's like the best colour system you can be working in when you're going to print. So the Pantone formula guide which is ... It's really kind of like the bread and butter of Pantone. Is a spot colour book with 2,180 colours in it printed on both coated paper and un-coated paper.

Really to give the understanding of how substrate affects that spot ink that the colour is printed on. And so that's the most popular book. And then frankly, it's even used well beyond printing and graphic design. We find textile designers who didn't know that there was a textile system, who are using Pantone books because it's just so easy to carry these around and communicate and really use that colour.

The colour bridge book that you just referenced ... In my opinion it's the most useful product that we have. And what does it is actually compares the spot colour printed on either coated on un-coated paper with the four colour CMYK process print equivalent of it.

And so if you're a designer and you are trying to evaluate really whether it's worth asking your printer to use spot inks and obviously you'd be paying a little bit more to use spot colour because of the amount of ink involved versus just producing that same colour in CMYK, this book give you a side by side comparison for each colour and it really lets you make the best colour choice.

And what you'll find when you look at this is that the spot colour in really every case, it's just a more vibrant reproduction of what that colour is that you picked. Because with only four colours, with cyan, magenta, yellow and black, with CMYK printing you're limited really in the colour gamut with what can be produced.

And so there's actually one other book that kind of fits in between these, which is, we have an extended gamut book, which is instead of spot and instead of four colours, CYMK printing, there's a extending gamut CMYK plus orange, purple, and green. It really becomes a seven colour process which is sort of like the midway point between CMYK and spot.

And that's another option as expended gamut printing becomes more popular, you as a designer have an ability to evaluate exactly how you want this colour to be produced at the end of the day. So these are physical colour books that tie to this digital standard that we have. And they show the final output in different scenarios.

Ian Paget: That was a fantastic explanation. And like I said, it wasn't until recently that I was aware that there was that colour bridge book and you're right, that's definitely the most useful one I have because I do have a couple of different ones. Originally I got the Pantone inks one, with the single Pantone colour. But having the bridge one has been really helpful.

I wanted to ask you about RGB colour space, because I've worked with a couple of companies over the last few years who are primarily online. So they've been able to get away with using RBG colour profiles within their logo. Are there any useful tools or useful approaches to recreate these colours more consistently in print?

There was one client that I worked with recently who used quite a vibrant blue. And even with the Pantone colour matching books that I have, finding the colour that was anywhere near it was pretty much impossible. The print equivalent of this colour is almost completely different. Are there any useful tools or inks or something that Pantone's created to allow for greater consistency with this type of problem?

Nicholas Bazarian: Yeah, that's a great question. This is actually ... It's interesting. As we see more and more companies kind of go through that tech startup phase of growing and then becoming somewhat of a player and then really start to think about going and doing branding beyond just their website, this has become a problem that we see from a lot of people and we've actually started consulting for at Pantone.

And what happens is, RGB is digital colour space. It exists only on screen and it's made up of red, green, and blue light that's displayed in your monitor. Each display, each monitor has its own ability to show colour. Each one potentially uses a different RGB colour space. There are a few of them.

Just for simplicity sake, let's say SRGB is the most common and what you're likely to receive from a client if you get an RGB colour. What happens is, a lot of the colours in RGB that you see on screen, they're not physically reproducible. And so when you get a client who's looking for the first time to say hey, I want some printed material with our colours and I want to see this on a banner and I want it on textile, they're stuck because their original colour that they picked won't get them there.

What we found is, a lot of times ... If you think about the colour space as a 3D, like a three dimensional space, the RGB space is much wider than the physically reproducible spot colour space from Pantone and much, much wider from let's say, like the CMYK colour space that's out there. And so it's possible that somebody could pick a colour in RGB that is outside of both the Pantone space and the CMYK space.

In those instances you have a few options. You can just start again and pick a new colour and you could look at the Pantone book as a way of doing that. What we've typically done at Pantone is we make the assumption that the customer doesn't necessarily want to go to a Pantone colour because they still want to keep a distinct digital identity. Especially if they are a tech company. But you do want to get them to a colour that's more consistent going from digital to physical.

And so what we'll typically do is we'll map their colour in this 3D space to show where it is in the RGB world and then overlay the Pantone space, the spot colour space, as well as the CMYK. And basically you actually have to walk the colour back from the edge. You're walking this colour from the edge of RGB back towards a colour that's maybe a little bit closer to the centre so that it can be physically reproduced.

And so sometimes that means mapping it to the closest Pantone. In other cases it means going to a colour that's slightly beyond what the Pantone colour system offers, but it's still physically reproducible either in spot colour, ink mixing, or potentially through some four colour process.

It's a pretty involved effort. For us it's actually a major consulting engagement because there's a lot of back and forth with your client trying to keep their identity but also trying to keep them with a scalable colour in the future. We've even found with certain colours particularly like in the purples and in the blues, like you just brought up in that example, with these colours even some monitors can't even display the colour appropriately.

We actually had one client recently that they picked a colour and it was this awesome digital colour. Kind of between a blue and a purple. Depending on what kind of screen you looked at it on, it was either blue or purple. It was never consistent. In a situation like that, it's not practical to ask your customer to calibrate their screen to see it the right way. And so we actually had to help the customer, walk their colour toward something that's a bit more stable and scalable to physical because eventually they did want to go physical with it.

But also, there are ways to control how colour is displayed across different RGB spaces on different devices. Really through browser coding, through CSS. So there are all these different things that you end up having to learn about in order to make a colour safer to use for someone who started digital but needs to go physical.

Ian Paget: That's fascinating, but I do have a few questions. So you mentioned about that particular colour that was between a pink and a blue and you spoke about finding a colour that was more stable. How are you actually doing that? Do you have some software that's allowing you to do that, and if you do, what can someone like myself do to prevent that issue from coming up?

Nicholas Bazarian: In that case we are working with colour scientists. Because we Pantone are part of a company called X-Rite, which is really the science of colour.

We work with X-Rite colour scientists to walk this colour through the colour space. So obviously that's not practical for the average graphic designer out there. But there are some tools that we do offer that are much more accessible and will, let's say, do a good enough job in most cases to get you where you need to go.

On our website we have a colour finder tool. It's also available through Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Creative Cloud Exchange called Pantone Connect. And this tool has a convert feature where if you have a hex code or you have an SRGB colour and you know it's causing problems for your client, you can convert it to the closest matching Pantone colour in this 3D colour space.

And with this tool we're not giving you the exact match because there's really typically no exact match to the colour that you started with. But what we are doing is showing you based off of the delta E, which is really like the distance between your starting point and the nearest Pantone colour, we're showing you what the closest Pantone colour is and then we're also showing you some other nearby alternatives maybe in different directions in that 3D colour space so that as you evaluate what the best match to your digital colour could be, you have some choices and you can pick the one that you think best suits your customer. That tool, depending on how you're using it, it's either free or for a very low annual fee you can access it.

Ian Paget: Yeah. So I assume that if you're an Adobe user you have free access to that and if you don't, there's a cost there. Is that right?

Nicholas Bazarian: So for the moment ... It's a new system for us called Pantone Connect that we're going to be doing an expanded launch of very soon. But it's currently actually open for free to all users through really the middle of the summer.

It's part of an offer we did given the covid-19 situation ongoing where everybody's working from home and having trouble communicating colour. So it's open and it's free to use today. In the future, it's really a freemium model. So some options are free to use, some are paid. And that's going to be within Adobe or wherever else the system is exposed or available to access.

Ian Paget: Yeah, amazing. I need to try it myself. Because I did see that you promoted that for Covid-19. I've never used it myself. I'm sure there's listeners that must have used it but I've never used it myself and I wasn't actually aware of the capabilities of it. So knowing that that's in there is useful. Are there any other useful features within that software that would be useful for a graphic designer?

Nicholas Bazarian: Yeah. The main challenge that we were trying to solve with launching Pantone Connect which went live last year was that Pantone colours, they're not all there within Adobe. I think many designers are aware of that because they've been asked for a colour and then they go into the swatch libraries in Adobe and they can't find it there and then start looking around and figure out that it's missing colours.

Ian Paget: Yeah. That's how I found out. Because like I said, I've only recently upgraded my books. The books I did have, they're really old so everything that's been in there has been in Adobe but literally the first colour I picked out, did a search within the Adobe swatches and it wasn't there. It wasn't until then that I found that there was colours missing and I needed to go through this process. So it would be great if you could talk through how you do go about adding them.

Nicholas Bazarian: Yeah. In the past we've had some software called Pantone colour Manager, which it's come with all of our books, that you could export the colours into Adobe. And you could export the most updated files. That challenge with this old software was that you were just doing an export and there really wasn't a whole lot more to go along with it.

So with Pantone Connect ... It's called an extension app. It's like a plugin for Adobe. It works natively within the tool set so that as you pick your colour, as you're going through the Pantone system and navigating it and sorting through it and filtering it, when you find the colour you're looking for, you can just really select the object or select the design element you want to add it to in your design file and put it right in.

You can also add it to your swatches so you have it saved for a later design at a later date. And then it actually works in the reverse. So a lot of times what we found was designer were getting some sort of jpeg or some sort of file from their customers, and they were trying to figure out what the closest Pantone was to it. And there was really no easy way to solve that.

So what we've added is the ability to use an eye dropper to really pick the colour within your design file that you're not sure about but you want to get a Pantone for and import it into this colour converter and convert it to the nearest Pantone colour and then you can make that swap and get it in there.

It's full of some other features as well that I would say are more of like an inspiration type tool to help pick colour palettes and ways of extracting colours from images so you can get colours you want. But it's really about cutting down on the time it takes to get to the right Pantone colour and then getting it into your design file very quickly and easily.

And then if you do work on a design team there are shared pallets so that, let's say everybody's working on the same project and you have 15 Pantone colours or five Pantone colours, you can add your teammates as collaborators to these palettes and really scale it and align people that way. This is how we're trying to bring Pantone colours to people in a more useful and a more accessible digital way for both our graphic design customers and our fashion product design customers as well.

Ian Paget: I wasn't actually aware it was so new. So when I did go about updating my colours, which only did like a month ago, I didn't use Pantone Connect. I used the manager and had to go through the whole process of exporting it as you mentioned. It wasn't too bad of a workflow but this sounds a lot more effective so I'm definitely going to be installing this straight after this interview and I'm sure any listeners that haven't already done that probably will too.

Nicholas Bazarian: There's a lot more coming with this tool as well. Be on the lookout for Pantone for some exciting new launches that go with it.

Ian Paget: What's the best way to keep up with that? Is it just a case of signing up to the newsletter and then you'll be up to date of what Pantone is doing?

Nicholas Bazarian: Yeah. I mean if you like to sign up for email, that's probably the best way. Just signing up on the Pantone website. But even following Pantone on Instagram or on other social feeds, you'll see a lot of news about some of the new digital features that are coming from Pantone relatively soon.

Ian Paget: So for the next section of questions, when I originally contacted you I made the assumption that Pantone was more focused on the colour books, but I've sensed realised sense you've got in touch and I noticed your URL had the X-Rite name in there, I've looked on that website and I can see that there's a whole load of other tools and services.

There's so many different things on there so I know that there's probably hours and hours and hours worth of conversation that we could go into. But I think it would be great to chat about what some of these products are and how we can use them. So one thing that I think a lot of designers will probably want to do is calibrate their screen in some way so that they know that what they're seeing on the screen is as precise as possible. So what tools are out there to help designers effectively calibrate their screen if it's even possible at all?

Nicholas Bazarian: It's a relevant point for really any designer in the sense of, even if you're only working digitally or primarily working digitally, you still want to know that the colours you're picking are consistent across the monitors you're working on and as well as colour accurate or at least to the best that your monitor or display can show those colours. While many newer displays are very good, there are still problems with inconsistency and so keeping your monitor calibrated is the best way to ensure that you're looking at colour really under the ideal viewing circumstances.

So actually if Pantone is, let's say the art and the branding of colour and really the use of colour as a language, X-Rite is a company that is really the parent company of Pantone. And X-Rite is the science of colour. And so X-Rite produces these calibration devices that will work with your monitor and work with software that you install on your computer. They can work in a number of different ways. They can show you the ideal viewing conditions for colour, whether it's to look at Pantone most accurately or to look at colour through another colour profile that maybe you wanted to view it under.

You have different RGB profiles that are out there. There's different industry standards. And you can adjust those settings based off of really whatever you need to be looking at a colour as. And what's really cool about these calibrators as well is if you have multiple displays or even if you're working on a large team, you can actually go ahead and calibrate each display and it'll give you a reading of which one has the best colour viewing conditions.

And where that's helpful is, if you work on a big team or even if you have like five or six displays because you do a lot of design and you have a lot of different creative work going on, you'll know which one has the best viewing for colour and that's where you can make your colour decisions when you're picking digitally. So calibration, it's a really important step for the inspiration phase of colour as well as for when you're actually designing and specifying colour. It's really that entire left hand side of the workflow. And what kind of goes hand and hand in that is doing colour profiling, which I alluded to a little bit.

And colour profiling is when ... You're basically setting your display to really work consistently across multiple devices, multiple input or output devices. So multiple monitors, multiple displays, multiple printers. So that when you pick a colour it's viewed consistently and the gamut is shown accurately as you go from working on screen to even working with a printer. So X-Rite makes these profiling devices as well. And in many cases when you buy a calibration device it also does profiling. So it accomplishes the viewing and let's say the transferability of colour as you work digitally from one space to another very easily.

Ian Paget: So how does it actually work when you do colour calibration? Because being honest with you, because I have a fairly new monitor, I made the assumption that the calibration of it is fairly accurate and I haven't taken that next step to properly calibrate it so that what I do see in there is 100% accurate. How does it work?

Do you need to buy something that you stick on the front of the screen and it calibrates it? Would you mind talking through what's out there? Because I know when I looked on the X-Rite site, there seemed to be lots of different options and I don't know what I would need personally.

Nicholas Bazarian: Yeah. And it's a little bit beyond my area of expertise. I will say from Pantone the i1Studio Designer Edition is probably the best for graphic designers out there, in the sense of it's a calibrator. It does profiling for you as well for both your monitor and your printer. And it can actually take measurements as well.

So if you have ... Let's say you receive colour samples from a customer and you want to find out what the nearest Pantone is, you can actually take a measurement with this device as well and get that reading in so you can design with that colour digitally. Let's say from a capability standpoint it's certainly not the top end, but also it's not like the lowest capable device either. It's kind of right in the middle of doing everything you need to do pretty well and accurately.

But as far as the calibration goes, it hangs over your screen and it essentially works with the software that you downloaded to put in a white point and adjust to a white point in that screen's capability and then show how the colours are displayed really to the best that the screen can do according to that white point profile that it's trying to get to.

It's a really helpful tool that kind of accomplishes everything you'd need to do digitally to be looking at colour on screen under the right conditions. And then to actually go to print with it.

Ian Paget: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. I need to get one of those. Because like I said, I've been reliant on the fact that my monitor is fairly accurate from purchasing it. But that's not the most professional way of doing it. So I think it'd be worth buying one of these to allow myself to do that.

Again, looking through the website there was a number of other tools and again, because I've not really been heavily involved on the print side of things, there's some tools I'm not familiar with. Would you mind talking through what a, if I can even say the word, spectrophotometer is? I hope I said that right. I know that print companies use them. I've seen them when I have gone to print companies but I don't really know what they do and how they're used and what they're for.

Nicholas Bazarian: So yeah, so a spectrophotometer.

Ian Paget: Okay. That's a mouthful.

Nicholas Bazarian: It's definitely not a colloquial word. And so spectrophotometers, they come in a wide variety. Because they're used in pretty much the production of colour in any industry you can think of.

What these do is they basically measure colour by measuring the reflectance of light off of a material or a surface that they read and that measurement is really what records what the colour is. And so the variation in these, they go from I would say, kind of like low cost, high accessibility.

So in some cases even a designer might be able to take advantage of some of the lower end type spectrophotometers that can take a pretty accurate reading for you to get the colour that you need. And they range all the way up to spectrophotometers that will measure at multiple angles really going all the way around in a circle to a chosen point in order to measure things like metallic auto paint. And these are devices that are used in the manufacture of cars and any kind of really high end coding that you might think of.

If you've ever been to a printer, printers use a specific type of spectrophotometer that measures colour at a 45 degree angle. And these are actually probably one of the most important tools for ensuring that the colour that you asked for is actually produced correctly.

So when you as a designer send your design file with your colour specifications to the printer, the first thing they're going to do is actually use software from X-Rite to help formulate the ink that they're trying to mix. It gives them the right formulations of colour that they need to produce the inks. And then when they do the actual print runs they will take a measurement of that colour on whatever paper you've given them with a spectrophotometer and they measure that final print run against the Pantone spectral data that they use in their software to determine really how close or how far off they are from the colour that you asked for.

When we go back to thinking about the workflow, now we're talking about the right hand side of this workflow where essentially the Pantone language is now a data point that somebody using a spectrophotometer is measuring against to see if they hit their target. And it all works hand and hand to get you really that accurate final colour at the end of the day.

Ian Paget: So you provide the print company the colour code. Say if you're getting it printed on a different material that absorbs the ink in a different way, are the print company using the spectrophotometer to measure the colour on that particular paper stock and creating a different ink so that it looks the same on that particular paper? Hopefully my question makes sense?

Nicholas Bazarian: It makes a lot of sense and it's one of the most challenging problems in going from design to print. So to your point, if you took a Pantone ink that was mixed and let's say you apply it so the same paper that the Pantone books are applied on, you're going to get the same colour as that Pantone book. Assuming you've actually controlled how you formulated the colour through the process. I

f you took that ink and let's say instead of printing it on that same white paper, it was printed on recyclable material that's maybe the backing is brown. And maybe depending on the print process or the type of ink, maybe even the inks are different, it's a different condition and it's a different dependent condition. And the Pantone colour that you mixed will not come out and look the same as what you specified when you picked it during design.

And so it's a big challenge. And what happens a lot of times is to compensate for this, printers, they'll apply much more ink to try to hit the colour that you asked for. They may also put down ... In the instance where let's say they are printing on like a brown recyclable material, they'll actually put down white underneath it first and then over it in order to get that colour.

And all of that works and it's just very expensive and it can lead to a very costly print job. And if it still doesn't quite get you the colour you want, you're going to spend a lot of money going and doing it again and it's not worth it for a lot of people.

So what we've actually done is ... So every single Pantone colour is measured with a spectrophotometer and those measurements live in the cloud. And what happens is we make that data available to printers to use in the software that they use for printing as these targets and as these formulation targets.

And what we've also done is we've gone ahead for packaging in particular and we've applied Pantone inks as they normally would be mixed to 36 different packaging substrates. Anything from different types of wrappers or labels to recyclable materials. Brown craft board is a good example because it's just so hard to hit the colour on. Even to things like aluminum cans. And we've taken the measurements of each of these colours really as sort of like derivatives of the Pantone system, which we call them dependent conditions, or dependent standards.

And so we actually have software for designers where let's say you're designing some logo that's going to go on a brown cardboard box. We can actually in your design file help you simulate how that colour will print when printed to really an achievable standard of what that Pantone colour is on a brown cardboard box. So we can simulate how your colour will change. And using that same simulation data those simulations become targets that your printers can try to aim towards rather than going towards that original colour that was specified on a white paper.

So what happens is instead of your printer spending lots and lots of money and doing many, many reruns trying to hit a colour that they really can't hit, we're giving them a target that's achievable and really predictable and saying if you can hit this target which may not look exactly the way it looks in the Pantone book but it's close to it, if you can hit this target, you're doing good and you should stop. This is a reasonable colour for you to get. So you're really setting expectations from the designer's point of view of how good the colour can be on the different materials to the printer with how good they can get when they're actually printing it.

It's called Pantone Live. There's different iterations of it for printing and for design. But it's really a way of communicating colour with this impact of substrate in a way that's achievable for everybody and understood for everybody ahead of time. Saves a lot of time and a lot of money, especially for designers who are working on big packaging programs for CPG companies. This is a way for them to cut down on them to cut down on the money that they waste and the time they waste designing and printing with colour.

Ian Paget: Amazing. Because I literally didn't know that software existed. So again after this, I will check that out and I'll make sure to link to it in the show notes as well for any listeners that might want to check it out as well.

There was another product on the website again that I had not seen and I'm not sure how it's used, where it can actually simulate different light conditions so SpectraLight. And that particular product uses seven different light sources. How is a product like that used in the real world? Are there companies out there that are actually choosing a Pantone ink based in the light conditions and recreating it to see how it might look?

Nicholas Bazarian: When you're picking colours and when you're assessing colour lighting is ... Of many things, it's one of the most important things to control. A lot of times design studios ... If you were to pick the ideal design studio you'd have skylights and a lot of natural light coming in. And that's because with that lighting you can assess your colour close to daylight and really get a good feel for how that colour is supposed to appear.

The reality is a lot of people work in press rooms or in factories or in dark spaces and they don't get that lighting. And so these light booths become really a critical tool. And so what they do is they show you under a few different lighting scenarios really what your colour looks like. And so some of those scenarios like D50 lighting is a ... It's like a simulation of warm daylight. That's typically used in graphic arts as a way to assess colour and that's the underlying light condition in a lot of the data that we collect. You can simulate that using one of these light booths so that you can look at how your colour is supposed to appear when it's printed.

There's D65 lighting which is typically used for more like product application and instead of warm daylight it's a bit of like a cooler but maybe a little bit brighter daylight as well. And so these light booths can simulate that lighting condition as well and then with the simple flip of a switch you can also simulate incandescent lighting. Which you think about retail, that might be like accent lighting where you might see a product up on the shelf with a spotlight on it. That could be incandescent.

And then some other light conditions, there's cool white fluorescent lighting where you think about large retail stores where they've got florescent lighting all over the place. You're basically simulating how your colour's going to look under essentially a store condition.

So all of these different lighting conditions, what they'll show is what you thought might have been a match to a sample that you received from a customer, if you switch between the different lighting conditions you'll find that colours that might have matched under one condition are completely different under another. And depending on what you're designing for that can be a make or break decision that you caught very early because you were looking at it under the right kind of lighting.

So it's a way to control upfront whether or not you're picking a colour that you want. Let's say you got some sort of lab dip or something. If you're working in textile or in printing if you've got sort of like an early production run from a printer and you wanted to compare it to the colour you asked for, you would stick it into this light booth and view it under whatever lighting conditions you wanted to see it under. And you can really assess whether or not it's the colour you asked for that way.

There's a condition called metamerism whereby essentially colours that appear the same under one condition are in fact different. Without getting into the colour science of metamerism because that is a topic in and of its own right.

In every single Pantone formula guidebook there's a lighting indicator where you can stick this lighting indicator under any light source including the room you're in, and if the two colours that are printed on it appear different it's basically telling you that you're not viewing that colour under the ideal lighting conditions. Whereas if you were to step ... Like maybe you step outside with it you'll notice that it doesn't that it doesn't appear as two colours anymore, it just appears as one. And then you'd know that you were viewing colour under the right lighting conditions.

So it's a handy little feature that comes in each Pantone guide that will really help you understand whether or not you can see colour the right way or not.

Ian Paget: I had no idea it was that way. So basically these colour booths, they're very much for making sure that the colour that you pick is completely accurate based on the conditions that you're creating that thing for. So if you know that it's going to be on the shelf in a shop you can actually just double check and make sure that you're picking the exact colour based on the conditions. Sounds really useful.

Nicholas Bazarian: Yeah. And so it comes in variations of three, five, and seven lighting conditions. I mean for the average graphic designer three lighting conditions is probably sufficient. There's a Pantone 3 Light Booth that will simulate those for you that's a pretty accessible product. If you really want to be looking at colour the right way, these are a must have.

Ian Paget: Yeah. I'll definitely check it out. Now we have about, I don't know, just over five minutes left and I've gone through most of the things I wanted to but I'm aware that there's so much more to this topic. Is there any products or any information that you feel could be really beneficial for graphic designers?

Nicholas Bazarian: Yeah. I think there are all sorts of technologies out there that really assist your process. And I think just understanding really how you can work with both digital and physical tools together to speed up your workflow, it's probably the most critical point. I think it's probably come through a bit in some of the topics we discussed.

If you're working solely with physical colour all the way through from when you're picking colours to when you're designing, you may not be seeing colour completely the right way or you may communicate one colour. And your printer, if they're working only physically, they may not be able to actually reproduce the colour you're asking for.

Alternatively if you are working only with digital tools, you may not really have an understanding of how that colour is going to appear in the real world under different lighting conditions. So working with a purely digital colour workflow will lead to its own set of problems and sort of maybe false expectations.

I think a key takeaway is really a combination of physical colour references and digital colour tools and standards and technology really will help you to get accurate colour as early as possible and then flow it through your workflow in a controlled and consistent way, and then communicate it to the people who need to produce your colour. And so I think just understanding that it is this digital physical process is absolutely critical.

A lot of what our team is working on right now is accelerating this digital to physical translation. So different ways to capture colour that are low cost but still accurate. There's a lot coming from Pantone and we're trying to facilitate it with a digital ecosystem that makes it really seamless to move that colour through your workflow. So lots to come very soon from Pantone in this regard. That's really I think the key for anybody trying to understand how to approach working with colour.

Ian Paget: Nick, this has been absolutely fascinating and I hope for anyone that might not be familiar with the best workflow for colour accuracy I can imagine they got a lot out of this. So thank you so much for making time out of your busy schedule to come on. We've had this booked in the calendar now for a few months so it's been great to speak with you. Thank you so much for your time, it's been amazing.

Nicholas Bazarian: Thank you Ian. It's been a pleasure to connect and I hope this really benefits everybody listening. Thanks.