Package Design | packagedesignmag.com

(May 2010) posted on Fri Jun 11, 2010

By Noel Jeffrey

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Color accuracy and consistency are essential to brand management. Designers and consumer product companies want color reproduction they can rely on. The struggle is ongoing but there are improved software and hardware tools available that work with profiles to automatically calibrate prepress workflows, proofing systems, and the press run itself. Color by the numbers is working today.
It’s significant that these tools are “talking” to each other as never before so that a project—from design to finishing—can meet standards like SWOP and GRACoL. CIP3 and CIP4 compatibility now joins prepress and press in ways that bridge islands of automation and promote color accuracy.
“The big thing in packaging is the different substrates and different inks,” says David Hunter, principal of Pilot Marketing in Minneapolis. “The challenge is to reproduce brand colors consistently across multiple substrates and in multiple combinations.”
Pilot Marketing, founded by Hunter in 1994, is a national organization that helps software companies build awareness of their technologies in the reseller channel. In addition, according to vendors in the field, interest in color management tools and standards is moving upstream. While they all agree that the majority of their customers are prepress houses and converters, they see a budding trend of interest in color management and standards like FIRST, GRACoL, and SWOP among designers and consumer product companies.
James Summers, president of GMG Americas, sees brand managers within consumer product companies buying some of his company’s products. “They want to shorten their time to market and are interested in color management for brand identity purposes. It’s a matter of quality control,” he says. “They’re coming to us and asking, ‘How do we work better with prepress companies?’ It’s happening much faster than I thought it would.”
Hunter also notes that there is more interest upstream in color management software and standards, for example the intelligent software from Alwan Color Expertise—one of their manufacturing partners. Larry Moore, EskoArtwork’s technical resource manager, says that some design houses have “taken the plunge” with his company’s prepress workflow products.