COLOUR COMMUNICATION

Do you love colours? Most people enjoy colours, either in products or simply in nature. Colours are an important part of our lives and give us so much joy and fascination every day. In our everyday speech, Ò I feel blueÓ , Ò red as a tomatoÓ or Ò I live in the green house down the streetÓ Ð we often boost the story-telling by describing colour or the feeling of colour. Colour is a rather complex phenomenon, especially in psychology. This is the story behind colour communication and why it can be so hard to understand each other!

Colour codes and communication

Ð piece of cake!?

Text: LOUISE KLARSTEN CEO ColourHouse Sweden

In the old days, we used descriptions like Òt omato redÓ. Well in production this is not precise enough anymore. For several reasons. First, our eyes can capture up to 10 million colours. But no production unit can manage that, it would be a never ending production line, which would be totally hopeless in the fashion industry because of lead time and costs. Secondly, tomatoes do not have the same red colour everywhere for natural reasons. As well as that, we are not sure if we capture the same idea of red evenly, as our eyes are individual, and our colour perception varies. Humidity makes a difference, and the quality of light is different in different parts of the world. Industrialisation, however, brought a need to simplify colour in design, production, quality control for an end-result which controls the colour in reproduction. Goethe tried to see all the colours through the prism, remember? And the artist, Munsell, around the turn of the last century got fed up with buying different colour shades every time he went to the art-shop for more paint. He started to describe colour in three dimensions too. And then this is where the world started, in the early days of colour communication systems in the 50s and 60s, to formulate the standard of colours, to describe colour in a three dimension: colour family, saturation of colour and level of added black. This led to the development and launch of a number of colour systems on the global market over the past 30 years, in all kind of industries. There is the German RAL, the Swedish NCS, the American Pantone, the American Munsell and the Japanese Scotdic. A realistic maximum is around 2,000 colours, which is also the number of colours many of the systems handle and offer as standard. They are all based on different materials, and were originally aimed at a specific business and product need, for graphics, paint, textiles, plastics and metallics and so on. Even today, people choose a system to match the product they are working with, but also influenced by the tradition and custom of their region, business or country. There is, however, a pressing need for global colour language in todayÕ s fast production lines. Visual colour communication guides and books are available in many industries and are used daily by product designers, production units, dyers, graphic designers, printers, weavers and so on. It is not only the products themselves that need colour and quality control, so also do the graphics in labels, packaging and communication. The whole world of online shopping has forced the industry to

try to improve digital colour communication on desktop, on a mobile phone, on a tabletÉ on a TV-set with internet connectionsÉ And on digital screens, all the old-world knowledge of how colour is created, is turned upside down, because on a screen, colour is created by colour, saturation and light, which is the opposite to physical colour where you add black pigments. This is one of the main reasons why we have so much trouble working on screen, looking perhaps at a t-shirt design and changing colours on the screen, to make up our minds Òt his looks like a nice rangeÓ. Then the journey starts. Can I print out the colours on my printer to match the screen. The answer is actually no. On screen we have so many more possibilities (larger colour space) but with a CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and key black) we can only achieve a limited range of visual colours. Green, in particular, is especially hard to manage in CMYK. It is, of course, possible to use Solid colour swatches. In a Pantone Plus (former PMS) solid colour 262C, got example, you have a better chance to compare to the screen. But you cannot print it out yourself, you need a printer to hand mix that colour for you and print out. It is OK with 1 or 2 colours, but it is not normal practice to print in original solid PMS colours to achieve full colour. So what you do is compare visually. It might be the case that you have a textile colour swatch, Pantone TCX (cotton) solid woven colour swatch. That will show you the right colour, but it is also very important to look at real colour, since we donÕ t yet wear digital clothes. In other words, do not make your final colour choice on a screen. By all means use cad for the everyday preliminary work, but when it comes to a final decision on colour, use a solid colour system

that matches your needs. And whatever choice of colours you finally make, perhaps a from a colour card of 45 colours, you order swatches for your production partners, so that they can control production using the visual sample.

DIGITAL COMMUNICATION

Digital colour communication has evolved in parallel with visual colour communication. As mentioned above, we all do our work on screen these days. But we would also like to pull colours out of a product into the digital world. We can measure a sample, get the reflection curve (digital) in a format such as QTX or CXF, and then the computer shows the colour digitally on our screen. This curve is useful in the dying process, with the necessary support of a physical sample to enable a final decision to be made to accept or reject a colour by eye.

There are many occasions where it is helpful to work with the colours in digital format. For instance, you have a photo of a nice printed dress and would love to extract the colours of that print. This can be done today with rather simple and effective tools, known as spectrophotometers. In production, those are advanced and expensive units, but for everyday work there are products such as like Color Munki and Capsure, that read colour from a surface, including uneven knitted surfaces, or from an uploaded digital photo in the newest 2010 versions. Then you can pull out, for example, the Pantone numbers in that print, and continue to work with that colour range. Quick and easy!

However, the digital and the human do not always agree on colours. There is another important

Cecilia Starke matching a+a colour range with Pantone Plus.

industrial fact called deviation. You do not want too high a deviation factor in production (between dye lots). A bestselling blue range of shirts should always Òl ook the sameÓ in colour. Well they are not same, but close enough. The deviation between dye lots is often set at acceptable 1.0 level in fashion. However, this is not always necessary, because the technical device might read a larger deviation, when our eyes see absolutely no difference. Bright yellow is one example where the eye might need a 2.5 difference between dye lots to recognise the difference. In other areas of colour, our human eye is very sensitive, as with the greys and khakis! To set a standard for production, the balance between the technical reflection curve and the human perception is a newer, more realistic way of handling colour deviation in production.

Colours influence each other. When you look at colours, do not allow other colours to contaminate your view! Our brain has is very good at remembering colours when they are together in a format. One single colour is hard to remember. However, it is also true that a red colour next to a blue fools the eye and the colours contaminate each other. This is why you should always evaluate colours one by one, without the disturbing influence of other colour reflections. That might lead to the wrong decision. However, sometimes we take advantage of this memory-effect, it can be both necessary and attractive to show colours in a colour range together. We remember them as a general impression. Some artists were true masters of colours and used this effect to make their paintings memorable and beautiful.

COLOUR SYSTEMS AND CODES

This is a jungle - not easy to understand or follow. Establishing differences by explaining which colour space each colour system is working in might make it easier to understand. LetÕ s start with the graphic colours. You work in different ways with graphic colour; one way is in original colour, where you need to choose a Solid colour. For instance, just about every logo in the world has a Pantone solid colour number. ÒV olvo blueÓ is one of the standard Pantone solid colours. That enables them to reproduce the colour in production and in new physical signs around the world. You see the same Volvo blue where ever you

go. ItÕ s very clever branding to stick to one colour logo, as so many other global brands do. OK, so if you want to produce brochures, what system do you use? You need to communicate CMYK, the 4-colour printing codes. This is how most printed material, such as magazines and brochures are produced, as it is cheap, fast and easy. Also our printers at work normally print CMYK only. So back again to a t-shirt range designed on my screen: the printer can only show the colours existing in the limited colour space offered by CMYK. The solid colours have a much greater colour space. So you have to be careful which Pantone code you use for which purpose. CMYK-code is normally not good for products, but is fine for 4-colourprinting. And vice-versa. There is CMYKOG-printing (hexachrome or 6-colour printing). With the addition of Orange and Green, you can achieve a much greater colour space in production. And this is great, apart from the cost of the CMYKOG printing which is, unfortunately, still rare and expensive.

Smart help is available from Bridge type products. If I have a solid Pantone Plus code, how would it appear in a brochure? Use the Bridge to simulate the Solid colours and how they appear in CMYK. In some areas, you can see that it is pointless to even suggest a print like that. Then you choose another colour which might use the mix of colour in a different way to achieve something more acceptable to the eye. ItÕ s demoralising to design a new shoe, in a lovely bright green, choose it to be on the front cover of the brochure and then, Oh no! Ð it looks like a pale pastel. That particular green was just not achievable in CMYK, and so you either print Solid colour (more expensive) or simply choose another colour. ing a colour 6-8 times, both lead time and cost would suffer badly. By working with true cotton swatches in the supply chain, you can avoid misunderstandings and ensure that the colour originally designed is also what is, in fact, reaching the stores on time. That is where the profitable business starts!

DESIGN TRENDS AND COLOUR ARCHIVES

International design agencies around the world often choose to show colours in their trend books in a real textile material such as cotton. They often code the closest possible match to global systems like Pantone ie. ItÕ s essential that you always check coding made by somebody else. You might not share their opinion of how the codes are set, so always check for yourself before passing a code on (or, even better, use the original swatch instead). Some of the advanced trend agencies offer their own colour archives to their customers, who can buy and use their original swatches (often in cotton) in their design work and sometimes also in their production lines. Their codes are often only understood by the users of the particular trend service, but they can pass on physical colour swatches, so it does work. Why colour archives are used as main or complementary colour systems is, of course, because we like more colours, and we might have fallen in love with special colours that your favourite design agency developed for you! And you might want to find unique colours that bring something rare and special to your collection. Design agencies with colour archive services include ie Carlin International Paris, D.cipher fm Color Archive London and A+A Designstudio Milan.

TExTILE COMMUNICATION

In textiles, there is a serious need to communicate colours using real textile samples. We do not want to

Òi magineÓ a colour from a paper chip, when it will

become a red coat in wool. No, the eye is very sensitive, and would like to see the colour in as natural and realistic way as possible. To have one colour system per all textile materials is just not possible. Since cot

ton is one of the most difficult fibres to dye, this is the most popular material for colour communication Òi f you can achieve it in cotton, it will be no problem with

other materialsÓ. For that reason, both the Pantone Textile system for fashion and home © and the Scotdic color system © both have cotton as their master material. To design, play with and choose from colour ranges in cotton is a pleasure. But the important factor is to work in true material swatches throughout the design, production and quality-control processes as well as in sales, to achieve acceptable colours rapidly and effectively. We do not want to waste time re-dye

CODES AND NAMES

Coming back to tomato red. From experience, we can give some useful and easily-applied advice to anyone people working in colour. ColourHouse has worked with colour communication since 1981 Ð initially with the fashion industry, and now on all levels of colour communication from design to production and sales, covering pretty much all kinds of products and services where colour is a meaningful argument. We have learned the hard way how difficult it is for creative people to remember and write colour codes (numbers) but how easy it is for them to remember names, such as Òc eladon blueÓ, Ò canary yellowÓ, Òd usk greyÓ. Somehow that gives a poetic impression, and the story is easier to remember by name. So our strong advice, when you are working with colour communication, if you can, is to use both a numerical code (19-0000TCX) and a name (black). That means that both the technical people (who remembers numerical values) and artistic types (who remember names) both understand the colour and can react if the Òt omato redÓ t urns out blue!

COLOUR IS THE REFLECTION OF LIGHT when it hits a surface, passes through your eyes and is interpreted at the back of your head where the sight-centre in your brain is located. This means in practice that the light conditions under which you watch the colour are crucial its perception in the brain. If you have a red ski-jacket, what impression does the brain have in daylight as against night? Well at night, there is no colour, it is just a dark shade. This is why it is so difficult to describe a crime scene from night vision if the lighting is poor! How do we overcome this problem? Well in some cases we don’t. But of course, when we look at professional retail for instance, they know very well how to re-create a kind of standard neutral light, always the same all year around: this is called store-light, and it enables you to make a safe colour choice when you shop. In fact, we try to study different light-sources, where there are standards to guide us to neutralise the local light conditions. You may use a Lightbox to check how a colour reacts under different light conditions: daylight (often D65 = 6500 kelvin) / store light (often TL84 = 4100 kelvin) / home light 2700 kelvin) and UV-light (to detect optical brighteners). OK, so I check my yellow sample t-shirt in a light box, but then what? Then we have something which the industry describes as Metamerism. This phenomenon occurs when, for instance, our yellow t-shirt looks different when I check it under the different light sources. Is that good? Well, of course it is not good to have a t-shirt which acts like a chameleon, with a different shade in different light source. Avoiding metamerism is vital, and the dyers and manufacturers work hard to avoid it. In same cases it is critical, particularly in the grey/khaki type of colours. Since they are a mix of more or less all other colours, they tend to be affected by the light source. In one light source the khaki t-shirt could look green, in another it might look grey or brown. This means returns to stores because customers are not satisfied, and we do not want to have unhappy consumers, so metameric colours are best avoided.

COLOUR IS THE REFLECTION OF LIGHT CODELIST OF COLOUR SYSTEMS

TExTILE SYSTEMS:

19-0000TCX

Pantone textile for fashion and home, cotton (1925 dyed colours on weave).

19-0000TPX

Pantone textile for fashion and home, paper (1925 solid printed colours) Compatible systems cotton and paper version.

C-054013

Scotdic Cotton System (2300 dyed colours on weave)

P-054013

Scotdic Polyester System (2450 dyed colours on weave) Non compatible systems cotton and polyester version.

SOLID GRAPHIC SYSTEMS:

286 C

Pantone Plus, formula guide, Solid coated print on paper (glossy appearance) 244 new*.

286 U

Pantone Plus, formula guide, Solid uncoated print on paper (matte appearance) 224 new*.

10126 C

Pantone Plus, premium metallics, Solid coated metallic print on paper, 300 new*.

9341C

Pantone Plus, pastels and neons, Solid coated print on paper, 42 new (glossy appear)*.

9341U

Pantone Plus, pastels and neons, Solid uncoated print on paper, 42 new (matte appear)* * amount of new colours launched June 2010.

CMYK PANTONE PLUS SERIES

(4 colour printing Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key-black).

P-41-1-C CMYK (former process guide), coated 4-colour-print on paper (glossy appear). P-41-1-C CMYK (former process guide), coated

P-41-1-U CMYK (former process guide), uncoated 4-colour-print on paper (matte appear).

PLASTIC SYSTEMS:

Q100-3-1

Pantone Plastic Opaque system (plastic chips).

T355-2-2

Pantone Plastic Transparente system (plastic chips).