I am having a headache with a brand palette from a client, the values in which don’t match Pantone’s colour finder values on their website nor my Adobe CC colour books. For example, when I select type 2748 into the Pantone Solid Colour book in Photoshop (brought in from previous version), the CMYK, RGB and Hex values are way off. I wondered if it was the Pantone+ Solid Colour book, but equally none of these are correct. When I type 2748 into the Pantone+ Colour Bridge Coated colour book in Photoshop, I get the CMYK values in the brand palette, but they don’t match Pantone’s values for 2748CP on the Pantone website. Has anyone come across this before?
Visual from the brand palette for ref.
Answer
In my experience brand color palettes are often inaccurate and overly simplified.
This is probably done to make it easier to use for amateurs and keep people on a “need to know basis”, but it does not ensure color likeness across different media.
When you start to understand just a little bit about color management, it can actually be very confusing when the color guidelines are simplified.
Let’s go through the Pantone, CMYK and RGB/HEX numbers separately and do a little detective work.
Pantone
The brand palette doesn’t specify whether the Pantone colors are printed on coated or uncoated paper. It basically just tells you to always use those three Pantone inks, no matter which paper you print on. So the effective color will differ depending on which paper you print on.
Either the designers deliberately chose to not care about that color difference or they aren’t aware of the difference.
CMYK
The CMYK colors seem to come from the values you get if you use the color book PANTONE+ Color Bridge Coated that comes with Adobe’s applications:
For some reason unknown to me, this is not the same values you get if you find the same colors on Pantone’s web site in the PANTONE Color Bridge Coated library:
https://www.pantone.com/color-finder/2748-CP
https://www.pantone.com/color-finder/711-CP
https://www.pantone.com/color-finder/2985-CP
(The numbers might match if you download the software available from Pantone’s web site, but I don’t have it installed on this computer, so I can’t check.)
The brand palette doesn’t specify which CMYK color profile it follows. It doesn’t even tell you if the CMYK numbers are intended for coated or uncoated paper. The given CMYK numbers will look different when printed on different kinds of paper by print houses following different standards. Here are some random examples:
RGB
The RGB values seem to come from the PANTONE Formula Guide Coated library on Pantone’s website:
https://www.pantone.com/color-finder/2748-C
https://www.pantone.com/color-finder/711-C
https://www.pantone.com/color-finder/2985-C
Again no RGB color profile is given, but we can probably assume that it’s supposed to be sRGB.
(The HEX codes are just another way of writing the RGB values.)
So what to do?
Pfew, what a mess. I totally understand your confusion, I often find myself in a similar situation trying to faithfully follow the brand guidelines, only to discover that they just don’t make completely sense. What to do really depends on how deeply you want to get involved. It’s hard for me to answer without knowing what exactly your job is.
If you are producing a whole array of products on different kinds of media and the company demands you to match the colors, this brand palette isn’t really a useful tool to accomplish that. It will take much more work to account for all the different situations. If they are really serious (and willing to pay for it) perhaps they should consult the company who made the brand palette.
If you are just doing a smaller job for the company perhaps you should just follow the guidelines and if something goes wrong with the colors you can at least say that you did as instructed.
Sometimes I would even alter the colors slightly myself without telling the client, if I knew that it would produce a better result.
In the end, the shortcomings of the brand palette might be a deliberate choice from the designers. That they have prioritized simplicity and ease of use over color likeness. That they have chosen to accept some error margin as long as the colors are more or less consistent.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : AnnaCh , Answer Author : Wolff