The Move to Digital Pt. 3

Now I’d like to get away a little from discussing people’s negative reactions to new technology and discuss what exactly my work entails. To do that I’ll have to mention Pantone.

Pantone Inc. Is a corporation based out of New Jersey. They have, over many years become the people who tell you what colour is which. They have many colour books of varying types (lets say coated and uncoated with a finish of some kind, just to give you a taste). Each colour in their books is numbered, and while this may not seem very important or interesting at first, consider the flag of a nation for example.

Of course we know that the Canadian flag is red and white, and that the American is red white, and blue. But which red? Certainly we can all agree there is a difference between the red of a Ferrari for example and the red of a 1989 Buick. Some people would call these two reds Fire Engine or Cherry red, versus Burgundy, or maybe Wine red. But even these associations to other objects are ambiguous when you are dealing with the formulas of dye for printing.

At work our digital printers use eight colours in varying percentages to penetrate the weave of the fabrics we print on, to achieve a specific colour. Now, most printers use four colours which will make this easier to explain. Cyan, magenta, yellow, and black are in the printer you would use at home. The difference between a colour with 50% magenta, 5% black, 45% yellow, and no cyan whatsoever will be quite different from one with 60% magenta, no black, 35% yellow, and 5% cyan.(fig. 1)

So Pantone offers numbers to associate with each colour which become the absolute colour for any given logo or flag. Canada for example uses #199 for its red, where as Turkey, who also has a red and white flag, would use #177.

Again, this may should absurd – but when you are dealing with many types of printing process, such as silk screening versus 8-colour digital acid dyes . . . well some math can really come in handy. There are formulas for any given colour, and they differ from dye to ink, to whatever you may be using. Worth mentioning for those who aren’t aware – your computer and TV use red, green, and blue to produce colours with the light of the screen rather than the cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK) of pigments. Some televisions (Sharp) have recently added Yellow to their screens in order to create brighter, crisper images which are popular with HD and Blu-ray.

Probably anyone coming to this blog with previous knowledge of art will know a great deal of this already, but I’d like to chronicle the evolution of this company’s printing process and that requires some background information.