Abandoned my go-to spot colors after a press guy in Chicago told me my brand guide was impossible to match on a 4-color press

He literally had a folder of failed proofs where my dark teal came out looking like swamp green every time, and that one sentence changed my whole approach to picking PMS values.

3 comments

3 Comments

gavinwood10d ago

That's fair, but I'd push back a little here. A problem that hits thousands of people in the middle of tax season or leaves them stuck in traffic with a bad transmission isn't a narrow problem at all. That's a common failure point that a lot of folks run into. @wadepalmer makes a strong point about how your perspective depends on whether you're the one dealing with it. The press guy in Chicago had a folder full of failed proofs. That might look like one designer's fussy brand guide to someone else, but to him and his shop, it was a repeating headache they had to fix over and over. Narrow and wide really depend on whose chair you're sitting in at the moment.

joseph_lewis9210d ago

Seems like a pretty narrow problem to me, honestly.

wadepalmer10d ago

Narrow until you're the one stuck dealing with it, right? Say you drive a 2015 Ford Focus with that Powershift transmission, or maybe you got a late-2000s Nissan with the bad CVT. That's not a niche problem, that's thousands of people ghosting their cars in traffic. Or think about a specific software bug in an old version of QuickBooks that only shows up during tax season. One guy's "narrow problem" is another guy's entire work week ruined. You never really see how big these cracks are until your wheel drops into one.