- Richard Robinson
- 30th June 2018
Here at BIDBI we strive to be more than just a printing company, by going to extra mile to help our customers create beautiful works of art by assisting and advising wherever we can on best practices, experimenting with the printing medium or just being a second pair of eyes. To help you on your way to a colour consensus and chromatic consistency, here's a quick guide to how we work with colour and how you can pick an ideal colourway for your branding or design.
How We Do Colour
At BIDBI we use the Pantone Matching System as a bridge between on-screen colours and physically printed items. The system can be used in either direction, whether you want to reproduce a piece of digital artwork in printed form, or have an existing printed items that needs digitalising. In it’s simplest form, a swatch book or colour chip book is placed next to an item and the closest match is picked. This will then give colour values that can be used to both mix and ink and colour your digital artwork.
Customers will often already have print colours as part of their branding, and will simply provide these to use. However sometimes artwork may not have references attached, so we will either use software to pick the closest matches, or ask the client to provide a piece of printed media they would like us to match to. We can provide mixed swatches printed on cotton for a small charge, if you need to check them, or we can even provide a full printed sample to ensure that the bags we print for you, are perfectly in line with your brand guidelines.
Mixing an ink isn’t always a straight-forward process, and often requires manual adjustment to account for the substrates natural composition or slight inaccuracies that come with the complexity of the operation. This is why we have a dedicated team on hand that knows colour and understand the ins and outs of mixing colour. Our state of the art software and ink set ensures minimal wastage and maximum accuracy by using a base to which small amounts of pigment can be added to. By inputting a Pantone value we can generate a recipe that is accurate down to the single gram and takes out most of the guess work that would be associated with more traditional methods of simply combining pre-pigmented inks.
Finding Your Perfect Match
There are a number of ways you can provide us with information that will lead to your perfect colour.
Send us Something: If you already have things printed with your design or branding but don’t have it digitally recorded, you can post the item to us to match to. This also applies if you just have a random object that you like the look of and would like a printed bag to match.
Embed: More often done by experienced artworkers, embedding the colour values into your artwork files ensures that we know what element of your design should be assigned to a particular ink. Whether it’s simply naming layers in Photoshop, or assigning Pantones to objects in Illustrator, this method is the most efficient for us, and helps us process your order and create proofs in super quick time.
Keep It Simple: If you don’t want to know the ins and outs of the process, but would like to simply pick a print colour, you can use Pantone’s online colour finder to find your shade.
Creating Contrast
Creating a piece of artwork that translates well when being printed onto tote bags is something that our more design minded conscious clients take into account when submitting their design to us. Are there any changes that need to be made to a piece of artwork for printing on this medium? Or if you’re creating a design from scratch, what colours will work best for me? There’s really no fixed answer to this, but there are tools you can use in the design process that will help, and our design team is also on hand to advise and create visuals for you so you can see how your design renders onto a printed bag. One simple rule to make your design stand out is to use dark colours on light fabrics, and light colours on dark fabrics.
The Colour Wheel
Originally established by Isaac Newton, the colour wheel is an illustration showing the organisation of colours and the relationships between them. By picking a colour on the wheel, a matching shade can be determined on the opposite side. Modern online colour calculators can now give exact combinations of colours and can instantly help you decide a colour scheme, which can potentially same you hours of time. Our personal favourite colour calculator is super useful and will give you a lovely looking scheme of 2,3 or 4 colours and provide the references to boot!
