With wide adoption from the design and style industries, knowledge of the existence of the Pantone Matching colour system is much more widespread that it was years ago. But its original function is still a big part of my working life.

Printing (colour printing on a commercial printing press) is done with 4 colours of ink: Cyan (light blue), Magenta (red), Yellow, and Black. CMYK. The black is not strictly necessary but is used to create true blacks and to reduce the amount of ink laid down on paper. Using these 4 inks printing presses can create a huge gamut (range) of colours

Often though, the gamut is not enough and in special cases like branding, designers want a specific colour. Pantone created a colour matching system back in the 50s that is pretty much the industry standard using 13 base pigments (14 if you include black) to create an even larger, standard colour gamut. Thus if you want to recreate the orange used in Penguin Book’s logo, you could get a close approximation using 0% cyan, 60% magenta, 80% yellow, 0% black or an exact match if you specify a “5th” colour which is Pantone 1505 or PMS 1505.

It’s a lot like going to the paint store and getting a specific tint, except with inks. And it comes at a cost, as a lot of presses only have 4 colour units and so either have to run all the paper through the press again to get the 5th colour or you have to move to a bigger, more specialized press that has a 5th tower.

But the best thing about the Pantone system is the swatch books. I got a brand new set a few weeks ago for my work on T8N magazine. There are tons of variations but in my industry, there are two basic sets. The first is the CMYK process book, which allows you to see a given process colour (that’s CMYK) actually printed on paper. It comes with two sets: coated and uncoated. Coated paper is gloss or semi-gloss paper that has a coating of clay on it. This forces the ink to sit on top of the coating and is therefore sharper and brighter. Uncoated is more like the everyday bond we use and the inks soak into the paper and thus is a bit duller and not as bright. The variation between the two can be extreme in certain colour ranges.

PMS Coated and Uncoated comparison

The other set is the Formula Guides. This includes over a 1000 different ‘Pantone’ colours, with one swatchbook for uncoated and one for coated. If you stop and think about it, this means that the had to mix the 1100+ inks and then print them, 7 colours at a time, on each swatch in the book. No wonder the sets retail for hundreds of dollars.

Of course this is a simplified explanation and the variations and exceptions of using inks and paper are skills unto themselves.

Cool huh?

The next issue is on press and should be delivered in a couple of days. Here is the cover… I like it a lot.

Covers so far…

I made this up for an article but my editor hated it so it got cut. But it’s green so…

It was actually part of a set:

 

You know that ad I disliked so much I wrote about it? Well they rebooked and want it upsized to a half-page…

Aaargh!

One of the things about doing a small magazine is that you do a lot of ads. One of the things about doing ads for a small magazine is your turnaround time is short. Very short. In the old days I might fuss over an ad for weeks and certainly the “idea” of an ad campaign was generally worked on over a season and each ad was thus just a variation that you played with for a week or so.

These days Rob usually sends me a size and a client name and asks me to make something up (see my Toast Post). If I am lucky he has included some body copy. If I am really lucky he has included some graphics (although 50% of the time they are too small or too ugly to be of any use) and if I am extremely lucky I get an ad or brochure to use as a base. Then he usually wants to see it the next day. Sometimes the same day. It’s a whole different kettle of fish. And, rather than getting feedback on the various options I try to supply, I usually get a few text changes or the infamous “Can you add a few Xmas ornaments or tinsel without making it look tacky?”, but mostly they just pick one and deliver an “approved.” And once it’s approved, fussing or changing anything beyond a bit of kerning is deeply frowned upon.

To get going, most companies have websites or Facebook pages and you can start there, looking for inspiration or at least a logo. Sometimes you resort to competitor’s ads to see what the genre looks like. And there is always the photo stock agency to mine for pictures, but that can get problematic if you don’t actually know what the companies product or brand is—and I don’t. It’s easiest to dump a bunch of stuff on the pasteboard and see what it looks like organically. One of my biggest challenges is always colour. If I have a good palette to start from then things generally flow ok. If I don’t, then I can run into some big problems that have me gritting my teeth later because with the short timelines switching boats midstream doesn’t happen. Take these two ads for the same client for example. I hate the first one and want nothing more than to start over. The second one works for a whole lot of reasons and is starting to become one of my favourites from this issue (which, btw, is off to the press as we speak).

 

Nevada Place came first. I had a brochure to steal copy and images from but it was a dark, dark blue with yellow headlines that wouldn’t work in a smaller format with all the other junk. So I visited Aryes and Oxford’s website for some inspiration. The colour palette that I ended up using comes straight from their site (except for the yellow which I kept from the brochure). A decision I regret, but after the first “approved” with request for adding a map, some starbursts and some more copy ( I believe the actual request was  “Needs more fluff”), changing the colour palette opens too many problems on such a short timeline.

Blech. And Yuck.

The second ad came a few days later with a sample ad done in a local newspaper. Instead of stealing their colour palette or design, I just took the lovely little square logo and adapted it as a framework for the ad. And I loved the way it turned out. This way I was working with someone else’s thoughtful design and stealing the time they spent fussing over colours to kickstart my design. It’s a way to magically “create” time.

I’d still love a week or two to fuss with the details and massage the copy, but I am generally pretty happy with the result.

So if I steal the palette from ad two and spend 5 minutes adapting it and switching some of the basic proportions (since I’ve had time to mull things over) I get this:

Still a long way from being good, but way better IMHO. It just needs some more time. This really is a different game than I am used to. Fun though.

This is a short (15 minutes or so) video of one fellows logo design process. What I find interesting is his process which mirrors mine fairly closely — although I will admit to often skipping the sketching much to my detriment. In regards to process I am almost entirely self-taught. My career paralleled the development of the computers and software, often starting with version 1; such was the case with Pagemaker, CorelDraw, Aldus Freehand and InDesign. THe result was, other than the occasional magazine article or coffee discussion with co workers, we all made our own way when it came to deciding how best to use the tools that were being developed.

So, if you ever wonder how I go about doing logos or wordmarks, watch this video. I have tons of files with multiple copy and pasted versions sitting disjointedly on the desktop. I don’t keep a sketchbook though… I tend to just doodle on whatever is at hand; maybe I should get one…

Aaron Draplin Takes On a Logo Design Challenge from lynda.com on Vimeo.

The big cheese had some specific ideas on what she wanted for graphics on this article but we still couldn’t find the hook. Hell we still couldn’t nail the title. And her initial ideas were a bit beyond our photographic or photoshop skills. So I started playing with ideas of folding boundaries and was reminded of those old Mad Magazine folding covers where you folded the image to reveal a hidden image. A few quick tutorials and some down and dirty photoshopping later and I sent her this:

Unfortunately the concept didn’t shine through, I doubted my ability to get it where it needed to be and the whole thing went over like a lead balloon. Still, I kept browsing the templates on DollarPhotoClub.com and muttering to myself. Eventually I found a folded piece of paper on a different angle and remembered the aerials that Brenda and I had taken last year on our little helicopter ride around the city. Maybe there was something of S. Albert and region there…

Nope. But there was this one of south Edmonton which was close enough in my books.

 

So now all I had to do was fold the image into the shape of my paper template, add highlight and shadows and I would be golden. Photoshop now has this awesome tool called Perspective Warp. Essentially you can just lay out a grid (or series of grids in this case) and then use the grid points to reshape the image as necessary. I used the folded image I had downloaded as my base for getting the right geometry and perspective.

 

Then it was a matter of studying the light and determining how to add highlights. At this point I deviated from the template and decided to go for a highlight in the center panel rather than a shadow. So I traced the outline of that panel with the Polygonal Lasso Tool, then made a new layer and filled the selection with white. Then I dropped the layer transparency down until I got the feel I wanted (it was around 17%). This had the added benefit of creating the illusion of actual folds.

At this point I turned off the bottom template layer. and added a new layer below everything. Once again I traced out a square shape with the Lasso and this time I filled it with black. Then I applied a pretty big Gaussian Blur (a standard Photoshop filter) to the layer, trying a whole bunch of settings until I got the effect I wanted.

Then it was simply a matter of turning back on all the appropriate layers and seeing what I had. The black shadow was way too prominent, giving the whole thing a hokey feel so I kept dropping the transparency on that layer until it felt a lot more subtle: around 41%. And that was that. The image got turned a bit in the final layout but since it was the only  object on the page the light and shadow would work at pretty much any angle. By crossing the gutter with the image and overlaying type on parts of the it the whole spread gained dimensionality. A pull quote was used to balance the image and the spread was done.

Oh and somewhere in there I pitched the idea as the landscape being flexible, and the final title was also settled. A good days work.

I did a lot of ads for this issue of the magazine. One of my favourites was for Toast, a new breakfast and lunch place opening soon (February) in St Albert. My first few concepts for Rob were without any real direction—no logo, no website, no nothing—and he hated them. He’s still too polite to say that, but he did. He’ll get over the politeness thing eventually.

  

I didn’t love them, but still kinda liked the way they were going.

After Rob finally coughed up the logo I took a whole different tack and came up with a few variations that everyone liked. This is the one we settled on.

I like it. And it makes me want to go there so…