How to achieve color consistency across the supply chain

When it comes to the color of your packaging design, what you see isn’t always what you’re going to get. It takes a great deal of (color) management to achieve color consistency across the supply chain, as well as a certain alertness to the most important pitfalls.

Color consistency: the number one challenge

X-Rite Pantone recently questioned 625 designers about go-to-market pitfalls and difficulties, and found achieving color consistency to be their number one challenge. As if getting everyone across the supply chain on board and communicating smoothly isn’t difficult enough, color also behaves differently on different materials and under different types of light as the day progresses. Fortunately, there are innovative color management solutions at hand.

As different as night and day

Daylight not only varies during the day (depending on the season and even the weather conditions) but across geographical locations as well, not to mention the difference between natural and artificial light. The best way for packaging designers, clients and other actors in the supply chain to approve a color under all possible lighting conditions is using a light booth.

Living in a material world

Most designers find their color inspiration in the physical world and capture it as a digital image, which is consequently transferred to the real world again. Hence the second top concern among packaging designers and brands: getting colors to look accurate on the final material(s). Various tools exist to simulate colors on various substrates, with a color-proofing software like Esko’s Color Engine being one of the greatest places to start.

Color management software

Esko’s Color Engine both acts as a color management platform, ensuring all stakeholders are working with the same color data at all times, and predicts exactly how the color in question will appear on the finished substrate.   Inspired by FlexoGlobal