The Pantone® Press

What color is on that press?

The hardest thing about printing is color matching. It's not as simple as mixing or buying a can of the Pantone formula the client selected. The press has to be very clean. You'd be amazed how a yellow turns into green or brown when it's put on a dirty press - even a press that was washed well can have some of the last color in it. Each ink has to be mixed with the job in mind too. Heavy coverage for instance requires a diluted version of the color, and once an ink has been modified with either opaque or transparent white the other ingredients have to be modified as well. Even then, how a color appears on a sheet is dependent on the sheet. All inks are transparent and take on the color of the paper. Red ink on a blue sheet makes purple.

Another dilemma is that Pantone ink formulas are optimized for offset printing, not letterpress. That's why we mix all our ink in-house, the old fashioned way. Even inks that we buy as Pantone formulas end up getting modified. After years of trial and error, we've learned a few things about inks and letterpress.

Order after order we get the color to look how it needs to look. It's a part of the job that too often is taken for granted, and gets much less attention in letterpress than impression or paper choice. But when you know what a challenge it can be, and you're able to anticipate the difficulties that may come up, this challenge becomes part of the design process. Clients are demanding, designers are demanding, ink mixing is demanding, and EM Letterpress is demanding!