Does anyone have any tips? When I start with new clients, I like to give them some color combos to choose from, often made in kuler. The little boxes of color all mixed up on the PS swatch pallet are limiting, and no matter what name you give it in kuler, since you can't see the colors from the ASE file icon it gets confusing I find. Maybe there's a little application that helps organize them visually? Just trying to keep everything professional with new clients. Thanks for any suggestions.
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Vancouver
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Re: suggestions for organizing swatches?
Tue, June 19, 2007 - 6:57 AMI would stick with Pantone. It's a common language everyone shares in the business. It will lend specificity in communicating with clients. -
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Re: suggestions for organizing swatches?
Tue, June 19, 2007 - 1:52 PMTrue...but I find that screens do a very poor job of representing the pantone inks. And a lot of the stuff I do is for screen or digital print.
More than anything, its the color combinations that I want to see all together on the screen. I don't want to have to make pdf's with little boxes every time, but i guess I could set up a template of shapes to fill with each new color in a multi-colored swatch. There's got to be something easier though... -
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Re: suggestions for organizing swatches?
Wed, June 20, 2007 - 7:40 AMYeah a template sounds useable. Also, there are a lot built-in color swatches in vector drawing and digital imaging programs. Usually, there's a web-color swatch. Sounds like you're designing websites.
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Re: suggestions for organizing swatches?
Fri, June 22, 2007 - 10:17 AM-- "but I find that screens do a very poor job of representing the pantone inks. "
I always have 2 sets of my color palette when I work with clients. one is the set of actual pantone values, the other is a set of the screen equivalent. I choose the colors I want from the book, then create new colors in my design program to create an on screen palette that matches the print as closely as possible. This lets the client see colors more accurately when proofing on screen. Then, when all design is approved, we simply replace the screen swatches with the pantone print swatches at the mechanical stage. I've been doing this for years. It works pretty easily. :)
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Re: suggestions for organizing swatches?
Fri, June 22, 2007 - 12:51 PMSounds like a good idea, except that screens do tend to differ and clients don't always understand that what you see on the screen is not what you'll get in print, so if you send them something to look at on their screen, they'll ask for the color to change...no matter how many times you tell them that it will match the pantone they selected from the book! Nevertheless, a good practice to get into. I need to pick up a Pantone swatch book sometime soon. How much are they / where do you get them?
Still wondering about my original concept of a small application that can quickly and efficiently organize groups of swatches? They have this kind of thing for fonts and images, so I figured there would probably be something out there for colors. -
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Re: suggestions for organizing swatches?
Fri, June 22, 2007 - 11:07 PMJason,
you are always going to have a color differential when you're presenting onscreen. :) The nice thing about working with Pantone is you can send the client a set of the actual swatches for reference when they're looking onscreen. You can also send them paper proofs. I've been doing the print/screen pantone thing for many years without a problem. It's just a matter of managing client expectations and education. :) When I've had customers be particularly antsy about the color issue I sent them paper proofs (laser prints that had been tweaked to match the PMS) every few revisions. So for example, I'd send them a jpg or PDF when we're going through rounds of text changes, stressing they are only approving content. Then when the content has final signoff I'll send a print proof with more accurate color, accompanied by PMS chips.
As far as an application for presenting swatches, I think it would be easiest to just make a template in your layout programs: Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark/Indesign. Then you can simply change the values for each project and send it over. I've found it's also helpful to have for reference when several people are working on the same project or the client calls you 6 months later for more work. Generally, I don't have more than 6-8 colors for an average project, so it's been ok to manage it that way. I recently worked on a monstrously complex web project and I think we had 30-40 different colors, but that hasn't been the norm.
To organize your swatches when actually working, you can create a custom palette in pretty much every program. For example, in Photoshop or InDesign you can make new swatches, then save that palette. When you want to work on the project you simply import the saved palette into your file. Hope that makes sense.
There are several different kinds of Pantone books. The main ones are coated, uncoated, metallic, process. The books aren't cheap but if you keep them protected you can get many, many years out of them. You can also buy the fans instead of the books. The fans show the colors, but don't have any chips you can tear out. www.dickblick.com/zz569/03/
I hope that helps.
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