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Serious question, a guy at the print shop in Dayton told me to drop red/green status dots and I thought it was overkill
About 5 weeks ago I dropped off a batch of 200 signs for a warehouse client, and the guy running the press asked if the green dot and red dot on our inspection forms meant anything. He pulled out his phone and showed me a color blind simulator app, and both dots came out looking like the same muddy brown. I sat in my truck for a minute and then sketched a fix on the back of the invoice: check mark for pass, X for fail, plus the word spelled out. The client called two days after install and said three of his floor leads had been guessing on those dots for months, so now I keep that simulator app bookmarked and check every chart before it goes out. What's the easiest free tool you all use for this, and does it hold up for printed stuff too?
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leo_price9d ago
Man, that simulator story got me because I had almost the same thing happen with a set of routing tags. The tool that stuck for me is the Coblis simulator, it's free and runs right in the browser, no sign-up or anything. I ran our actual print files through it as PNGs, not just screenshots, since the colors shift a bit once they hit paper and that catches it early. One thing that saved me too was adding a texture or pattern alongside the color, so even someone who can't tell red from green can still read the chart by the shape. Takes ten extra minutes but nobody's guessing anymore.
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val_taylor9d ago
Does the simulator even matter if the print shop swaps paper or ink on you without saying anything? You tested a PNG on your screen, but the thing that actually wrecked my last batch was a different printer than the one I proofed on. Patterns help sometimes, but slap too many on a small tag and it turns into visual noise that slows everyone down, including the people with normal color vision. I'd rather push the vendor to stick to one fixed palette and sign off on a physical proof than trust a free browser tool to catch everything.
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