The Trouble with Color Matching

What is a Pantone Color?  Pantone colors seem like a miracle for designers when they first start designing for print.  It is a color selection system that should print exactly the color that they see in their swatch books. Designing everything using Pantone inks may not be the best idea. What most designers have never been told is that the Pantone Color matching system is great if your customer wants to pay for the specific Pantone inks to be ordered from Pantone and used in the press in place of the traditional Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and black inks that make up standard full color press printing.  Once you design something that contains more than 2 pantone inks, the price is considerably higher than standard 4-color printing (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black ink) due to the cost of ordering the specific Pantone Inks.  The combination of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black inks can create just about any color that you are looking for… with some major exceptions.  The problems arise when designers go overboard picking multiple pantone colors for their designs.  For example I recently had a customer send us a postcard from a design agency in which the agency had chosen 5 different Pantone or PMS colors as the “brand” colors.  This seems like the right thing to do to ensure the color will not vary from one printed piece to another, but one of those colors was Pantone Orange 21.  If you view Pantone Orange 21 on your monitor and in a Pantone Swatch book it is a very bright orange.  It was what seemed to be a very nice color choice. However since we had priced the postcard as our standard full color printing, CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black ink) printing, we had to convert the PMS Orange 021 in the design into the following color breakdown: 0% Cyan ink, 68% Magenta ink, 100% yellow ink, and 0% Black ink.  This color breakdown, which is the recommended color breakdown by Pantone, creates a much different orange color. Why? Since Pantone creates the Pantone Orange 021 ink using unique pigments that are completely different from Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black, the final color is a color that can not be achieved using mixes of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black ink.  The best we can do is to attempt to get it as close as possible.  Here is an image with Pantone 021 ink next to the suggested CMYK combination to show you the difference.

What you are viewing is not a correct and absolute representation of the inks since you are viewing these colors on a monitor that combines Red, Green and Blue to create the colors you see.

Although the difference may not seem like much to you on your monitor, the difference can mean a lot to your customer.

The best way to avoid running into this color matching problem is to purchase a Pantone Color Bridge, which shows the Pantone inks side by side with the recommended CMYK mix.  Once you view the differences it will change how you chose the colors for your next project.