Consistent brand colors

Hi Ron,

I am new to this group (about 20 seconds precisely) but I saw your question and wanted to help. Your situation happens so frequently within companies and I applaud you for wanting to maintain "the Brand" as much as possible. As you mention above, going from digital to print can alter a palette quite a bit (reds and blues are especially difficult to keep consistent). Just a couple of days ago, I stumbled across a few sites you may find useful. The first is Color Palette Generator by DeGraeve. Here is there link: http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/   

The other site is by Color Hunter and has an appropriate URL: http://www.colorhunter.com/

My favorite that I've used a lot is by Adobe called Kuler: http://kuler.adobe.com

Not to confuse but to help you see how robust these types of sites can get, I am including this one from Color Scheme Designer, which looks like it converts RGB to Pantone and Opaltone: http://colorschemedesigner.com/

Best wishes and I hope these help. Remember, it's all about The Brand!

Cheryl

Hi Ron,

I'm not graphics guru, but have dealt with this issue. Here is what I found...

Simple Answer:

Forget Pantone conversions and CMYK. Are there Pantone conversion charts (now unsupported) available ? Yes, but converting from print to webcolor this way is tricky as it includes assumptions about the background color of paper and other factors. (Use the conversions only as a rough check to see if the published RGB or Hex values are in the ballpark)

If a company does not publish Hex (web) values for corporate colors, convert them directly from RGB values. Someone, somewhere in Marketing chose those RGB values for onscreen applications and that is what you should go by.

Once you have your on-screen corporate colors set, then absolutely create and save a new color pallete in PPT using those colors.

Finally, the days of worrying about using only websafe colors is pretty much over unless your users are using some pretty specific hardware with limitations. So don't worry about having to shift colors to the websafe pallette.

Deepend Knowledge:

Print color is a "subtractive" process where you start with white light (all colors equally) and the ink/apaint subtract certain parts of the full spectrum of light to creat color. In other words, a red ink/paint subtracts (absorbs) some of the light but reflects back more of it in the red spectrum; this creating red to the eye.

On-screen color is an "addittive" process where you start with no light (and no color) and add in differing amounts of colored light to achieve the desired color.

Converting from one to another is not clean and easy as a variety of factors are involved. That's why it's best to avoid doing that conversion yourself and go with the RGB/HEX values that are approved.

Hope this helps,

Bob

Hi Cheryl and Bob,

Thanks for the great information!

I learned that the brand color spec had been changed slightly and some of the graphics were designed using previous values. This all makes a whole lot more sense with that info.