The boxes come in from the printer. You open one, pull out a brochure and hold it up next to your laptop. The blue on the cover is close to the blue on your website, but it’s a little darker and a little flatter, and now you can’t stop seeing it.
Usually nobody made a mistake. Brand consistency between a screen and a sheet of paper doesn’t happen by default, because the two make color in different ways. Getting them to agree takes a standard and a plan.
Where the mismatch shows up
The website next to the brochure is the one most people catch first. Then you start noticing the rest. The carton looks warmer than the brochure. At the trade show, the banner is brighter than both.
The one that costs you is the reorder. Same file, six months later, and the new brochures don’t quite match the old ones still sitting in the supply closet. Your customers will never hold your website up to your brochure. They will see two brochures side by side in a rack.
Why screens and paper disagree
A screen makes color with light. It mixes red, green and blue (RGB), and it glows.
A press makes color with ink. On most jobs that’s four inks, cyan, magenta, yellow and black, known as CMYK. Unlike a screen, ink sits on the sheet and reflects whatever light is in the room.
So a screen can show some colors that four inks can’t build. Bright oranges, electric blues and vivid greens are the usual trouble spots. When a file like that goes to print, the nearest printable color stands in for the one you picked.
For a color that has to be right, printers use a spot color. That’s a single ink mixed to a formula and identified by a reference number, the way a paint store mixes a named color.
Paper changes things too. Uncoated paper soaks up ink, so color looks softer. Coated paper holds ink on the surface, so the same color looks sharper and richer. A coating over the top shifts it again, and so does the press it runs on.
And your monitor isn’t a standard either. Your designer’s screen and yours are probably showing two slightly different blues right now.
What you control
Start with the brand guide. It should give every brand color twice: once in screen values (RGB and hex) and once in print values (a CMYK build and a spot color reference). If the guide only lists a hex code, each designer and each printer has to convert it on their own, and they won’t all land in the same place.
Next, build print files as print files. That means CMYK, with any spot colors named in the file. Artwork pulled from the website in RGB gets converted somewhere down the line, and you won’t be the one choosing how.
Last, approve a proof and not a monitor. A proof shows you what ink will do on paper. Look at it in good light, next to an earlier printed piece if you have one.
Even with all of that, paper won’t look exactly like a lit screen. What you can get is print color that’s predictable, and the same every time you order.
What your printer controls
The printer’s job is to hold a color standard, so the same file gives the same result on a different press and on the next order.
That’s what our G7 Master Qualified status is for. G7 is a recognized method for keeping color and gray balance matched across presses and print types, and we hold it for our offset printing and digital printing. In practice, a short digital run and a long offset run can sit on the same table and look like one brand. The reorder is built to match the first order.
It helps that we don’t sub it out. Your brochure, your box and your mailer come out of one building, not from three vendors each making their own call on your blue.
Banners and signs print on different equipment and different materials. Give them the same treatment: send the brand guide and ask to see a sample before the full job runs.
Color isn’t the whole brand
A perfect blue won’t save a piece set in the wrong font.
Type, photo style and layout carry your brand as much as color does. Keep one set of templates for web and print, built from the same fonts, the same logo spacing and the same way of treating photos. Check that your fonts are licensed for both uses. Then store the templates with the brand guide, in one place everybody can reach, so nobody builds a sales sheet from a file they found on their desktop.
Your next step
Send your brand guide with your first job, and ask for a proof. If the guide only has screen values, say so up front, before the press runs.
We’re an independently owned commercial printer in Fenton, Missouri, and the owners are available to talk your job through. Call (636) 343-1167 or request a quote.
