RECENT DESIGN ACTIVITY

Why use Color Code Book?

Many Designers design using WYSIWYG approach, although it is very comfortable and time saving, it could hurt you when your prints come back form the commercial printing press and you began yelling, screaming, scratching your head, and calling the printing firm blaming them how dare they printed the sky purple instead of blue. Playing the blaming game will not pass.

In this example I show you one of my design projects which I failed to color correct and it printed as shown on the right

WYSIWYG stands for What-you-see-is-what-you-get. It maybe safe to design with WYSIWYG mentality for the web, but definately a deadly sin when designing for a print publication. That is why every designer must carry with him a color code book, and a color combination book.. Since your computer monitor displays its own color temperatures and depths of each monitor differes than what your prints produce, you will never be able to see properly on screen what you see on paper. You may invest $2,000 or more on a real computer monitor which has a special hardware that you can use to adjust your monitors color depth and temperature, but even then, that only may guarantee 98% accuracy. Another words, stop second guessing and start using color code books to get on paper what you are intending to get.

In the past, I’ve made many mistakes by not using a color code book. Color code books are a pain to use because they slow you down in your design process and they might deceive your vision, but they will save you money on reprinting costs especially when you are using a cheap printing firm which gives you NO PROOFS. So it is absolutely necessary to go by color book when printing without proofs. Sometimes plugging in certain color combination may look dual or skewed on screen, don’t pay any attention to that because your monitor’s colors are improperly adjusted, be calm as long as you plugged in the correct CMYK numbers for each solid color.

To plugin CMYK color numbers in Photoshop, from your Tools Pallete, click on the color box to open “Color Picker” window as shown in the pic. From the window you can plug in the CMYK numbers or click on “Color Libraries”. If you will be specifying a special color process such as Pentone then use “Color Libraries”. To use Pentone colors, you would need to purchase Pentone Color Guide.

Color code books will not help you in adjusting your pictures, those you would have to learn to adjust on your own. That’s why I recommend to deal only with High Quality purchased images. Color Code book will help you adjust solid colors and color gradients only. The photo color adjustment is a separate task to master. Maybe later I could write a little bit more about that.

To use the Color Book is simple, read the steps
and look at the values, as presented in the pic.
Each Book may be slightly different, but they all
practically follow the same format.

The Color Code books can be found in your local Barnes and Noble book store or Border’s book place. You might want to consider carrying several Color Books. At least carry one book which shows color index on glossy pages and another on matte pages, since paper stock will effect the color saturation, that way you would know which color book to use for which project. If you want to purchase online goto http://www.tintbooks.com/

You may consider purchasing a color combination book for projects where you know you would be using at least 3 solid colors. The color combination book will help you determine which colors work in harmony, this will help you better incorporate color combination theory into all your designs.

---

Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically each day to your feed reader.

Bibikova.com Blog | Powered by WordPress | bibikova.com is a Bibikov and Associates Company