Pantone Colors? How much do you really know about it?
Thursday, 26 April 2007 @ 15:18So how much do we all really understand Pantone colors? For instance at my work the corporate Pantone is a green number 377. I generally use 377 C, since a lot of what we do ends up on coated papers, though sometimes not. In the cases that I use a nice, uncoated paper, generally Cougar 100lb cover and 10 lb text, I use 377 U.
C = coated, and is always the best for coated papers? Right?
U = uncoated, and is always the best for uncoated papers? Right?
Well what about CV, CVC or other off shoots? When are they appropriate? How do you handle the print colors for your brands?
Discuss.
Yes, C and U stand for coated and uncoated respectively. The other suffixes that you are asking about do not have anything to do with printing. They are “computer video” representations of that color and are for on screen use only.
The most common Pantone suffixes are:
U = uncoated paper
C = coated paper
M = matte paper
CV = computer video (electronic simulation)
CVU = computer video - uncoated
CVC = computer video - coated
Why would anyone need to use an uncoated Pantone for video. :P
Wouldn’t it make more sense to stick with RGB or Hex values? Do people use these simple to have a spot color for on-screen as well?
Most of our physical collateral gets printed on a digital press (since the quantities are low). Interestingly, even though the press prints in CMYK, we discovered that we were able to achieve much more accurate and consistent representations of our corporate color using our uncoated PMS for jobs than our CMYK equivelant. So, for us, that would be the version that we use the most.
Well, I have learned through trial and error what represents out green the best. Green is of course a very hard color to hit correctly. And you should know since you copied us. ;) (That’s a joke) but I believe our greens are very similar.
We have a digital printer that just tweaked their machines bit by bit until they found the right solution for hitting our color. On environmental graphics, such as retractable banners, we actually print them on a photographic press, and have to swap out our pantone for one 9 steps off to simulate our color correctly. It is quite off, but works like a charm.
The computer video value isn’t for use in motion video; it is supposed to be an accurate representation of C and U on screen.
Eh, I think just using RGB values is fine. Even viewing 377 on screen is fine. I know what it will look like in print, and I know what it looks like on screen.
I think that the argument could be made that you should use RGB values over a Pantone equivalent for the Web since you’ll likely use those values for a plethora of other uses. It would seem safer to me to pick values that could be replicated by anyone in the company for Word, Excel, PPT, etc.