Hi all,
three years ago we got the following data from the people who did the Fellowship layout:
- SmartCard bright green: 50,0,100,0 (CMYK), or Pantone: 376C - SmartCard dark green & logo: 70,0,100,0 (CMYK), or Pantone: 361C - RGB logo color: 99,152,41 (Web only)
Now we have some problems with that. We want to use the same color for all websites and website buttons, etc. and also consistent in all printed forms. We know that we can never be consistent across different mediums, at least not 100%. But we would like to aim to be consistent within the same medium, so all web pages using the fellowship greens should have the same colour of green, and so on.
Gimp said that 70/0/100/0 is 6bb340. But how can it at the same time be 639829 as they claim for the fellowship logo??
Is this statement true:
I don't think you should stare yourself blind at that :-) According to this page for instance, http://blog.indika.net.id/html-color-codes-matching-chart-pantone-cmyk-rgb-h... 7489 C is not 70/0/100/0 but 60/0/80/7 :-) There's no one true perfect answer for either, since even saying that 7489 C is 70/0/100/0 is a conversion from the Pantone scale to the CMYK scale.
It's a lossy conversation if you will ;-)
Is there a perfect mathematically strict conversion between RGB and CMYK? Or is it dependant on a lot of things? Does it depend which printer you are using when using CMYK?
Reinhard found this one and said that it is perhaps what we need:
http://www.publisher.ch/heft/056/Pantone.php3
Wie erscheint eine Pantone-Sonderfarbe, wenn sie im Vierfarbendruck mit Cyan, Magenta, Yellow und Schwarz simuliert wird? Die Color Bridge gibt darauf eine optische Antwort. Mit diesem Werkzeug können Sonderfarben direkt mit den entsprechenden und neu bestimmten Prozessfarben verglichen werden. Zudem erhält der Anwender der Color Bridge die sRGB- und HTML-Farbwerte der jeweiligen Pantone-Farbe.
Can someone here help us what we have to do to be consitent in differnt media (web, print)? We do not have much clue about that.
Thanks, Matthias
Hi Matthias, List People,
Exact color replication is pretty much in one league with voodoo and other forms of black magic. Trust me - you will always get close easily, but exact replication is ludicrous unless you have a really big budget.
To get back to some of the questions raised in your email:
Pantone: This is a proprietary (ring a bell?) color system based on using exact physical colors. So as it was pointed out, most do emulate Pantone with CMYK, but what is normally done is to use the physical pantone bucket of color for the one referenced in the data used for print. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantone
RGB->CMYK: What RGB? ProPhoto RGB, Adobe RGB or maybe sRGB? Strange Insider-jokes aside, there is no perfect mapping as they represent different color spaces: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_space
GIMP&CMYK: The GIMP only uses an immediate mapping to simulate CMYK to RGB conversion which is of course lossy as demonstrated above.
The bottom line is that I would avoid trying to overachieve on color management. A lot of people just emulate Pantone in CMYK anyways and nobody notices anyhoo. Making an exact match from CMYK to RGB is pointless as they are used in two completely different types of application - one for the three colored computer screen, the other for four colored print.
It should be much more helpful to make a small set of reference colors for the programs we know are used. So you would define a set of RGB colors for usage with the GIMP and Inkscape and then maybe use the provided CMYK colors for scribus and alike.
But to stress this point again: If this is about materials and brochures that will be printed in limited numbers, the time you put into all the color management (not to mention that most of the proprietary color spaces are not supported in most Free Software) is wasted. There are good and reasonably priced online-printing services (like flyeralarm.de for Germany) who can handle even RGB pdfs very well and the difference in color is negligible. Unless of course you suddenly feel we are Deutsche Telekom and WE NEED EXACTLY THIS TONE OF PINK!
take care, David
Matthias Kirschner wrote:
Hi all,
three years ago we got the following data from the people who did the Fellowship layout:
- SmartCard bright green: 50,0,100,0 (CMYK), or Pantone: 376C
- SmartCard dark green & logo: 70,0,100,0 (CMYK), or Pantone: 361C
- RGB logo color: 99,152,41 (Web only)
Now we have some problems with that. We want to use the same color for all websites and website buttons, etc. and also consistent in all printed forms. We know that we can never be consistent across different mediums, at least not 100%. But we would like to aim to be consistent within the same medium, so all web pages using the fellowship greens should have the same colour of green, and so on.
Gimp said that 70/0/100/0 is 6bb340. But how can it at the same time be 639829 as they claim for the fellowship logo??
Is this statement true:
I don't think you should stare yourself blind at that :-) According to this page for instance, http://blog.indika.net.id/html-color-codes-matching-chart-pantone-cmyk-rgb-hex/ 7489 C is not 70/0/100/0 but 60/0/80/7 :-) There's no one true perfect answer for either, since even saying that 7489 C is 70/0/100/0 is a conversion from the Pantone scale to the CMYK scale. It's a lossy conversation if you will ;-)Is there a perfect mathematically strict conversion between RGB and CMYK? Or is it dependant on a lot of things? Does it depend which printer you are using when using CMYK?
Reinhard found this one and said that it is perhaps what we need:
http://www.publisher.ch/heft/056/Pantone.php3 Wie erscheint eine Pantone-Sonderfarbe, wenn sie im Vierfarbendruck mit Cyan, Magenta, Yellow und Schwarz simuliert wird? Die Color Bridge gibt darauf eine optische Antwort. Mit diesem Werkzeug können Sonderfarben direkt mit den entsprechenden und neu bestimmten Prozessfarben verglichen werden. Zudem erhält der Anwender der Color Bridge die sRGB- und HTML-Farbwerte der jeweiligen Pantone-Farbe.Can someone here help us what we have to do to be consitent in differnt media (web, print)? We do not have much clue about that.
Thanks, Matthias
Hello David,
I make a full-quote so Reinhard can also read it.
* David Deutsch skOre@skOre.de [2008-04-07 17:07:02 +0200]:
Exact color replication is pretty much in one league with voodoo and other forms of black magic. Trust me - you will always get close easily, but exact replication is ludicrous unless you have a really big budget.
We do not have a big budget ;)
To get back to some of the questions raised in your email:
Pantone: This is a proprietary (ring a bell?) color system based on using exact physical colors. So as it was pointed out, most do emulate Pantone with CMYK, but what is normally done is to use the physical pantone bucket of color for the one referenced in the data used for print. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantone
RGB->CMYK: What RGB? ProPhoto RGB, Adobe RGB or maybe sRGB? Strange Insider-jokes aside, there is no perfect mapping as they represent different color spaces: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_space
GIMP&CMYK: The GIMP only uses an immediate mapping to simulate CMYK to RGB conversion which is of course lossy as demonstrated above.
The bottom line is that I would avoid trying to overachieve on color management. A lot of people just emulate Pantone in CMYK anyways and nobody notices anyhoo. Making an exact match from CMYK to RGB is pointless as they are used in two completely different types of application - one for the three colored computer screen, the other for four colored print.
Ok.
It should be much more helpful to make a small set of reference colors for the programs we know are used. So you would define a set of RGB colors for usage with the GIMP and Inkscape and then maybe use the provided CMYK colors for scribus and alike.
Yes, that would be really helpful. For the Card we already have it:
- SmartCard bright green: 50,0,100,0 (CMYK), or Pantone: 376C - SmartCard dark green & logo: 70,0,100,0 (CMYK), or Pantone: 361C
Who can help to find colors as David suggested? At the moment we need a fast decision for:
- Printing ~5000 leaflets for the Fellowship (like the green on this http://download.fsfeurope.org/tmp/fellowship-customizable-leaflet-blank.pdf) - webcolor (for the green header on http://www.fsfe.org/, the two greens for the webversion of the card http://www.fsfe.org/design/fsfe/images/fsfe_card.jpg) or do you think they are ok?
But to stress this point again: If this is about materials and brochures that will be printed in limited numbers, the time you put into all the color management (not to mention that most of the proprietary color spaces are not supported in most Free Software) is wasted. There are good and reasonably priced online-printing services (like flyeralarm.de for Germany) who can handle even RGB pdfs very well and the difference in color is negligible. Unless of course you suddenly feel we are Deutsche Telekom and WE NEED EXACTLY THIS TONE OF PINK!
Thank you very much for your explanation. Also thanks to Markus for phoning me on this issue.
Best wishes, Matthias
Am Mittwoch, den 09.04.2008, 17:35 +0200 schrieb Matthias Kirschner:
- SmartCard bright green: 50,0,100,0 (CMYK), or Pantone: 376C
- SmartCard dark green & logo: 70,0,100,0 (CMYK), or Pantone: 361C
FWIW, I think the CMYK values given here are very rough estimates, and I believe we should take the Pantone value as the "authoritive" value.
Thanks, Reinhard
Matthias Kirschner wrote:
Yes, that would be really helpful. For the Card we already have it:
- SmartCard bright green: 50,0,100,0 (CMYK), or Pantone: 376C -
SmartCard dark green & logo: 70,0,100,0 (CMYK), or Pantone: 361C
Who can help to find colors as David suggested? At the moment we need a fast decision for:
- Printing ~5000 leaflets for the Fellowship (like the green on
this http://download.fsfeurope.org/tmp/fellowship-customizable-leaflet-blank.pdf)
This leaflet was clearly produced for printing - if you open it with a standard acrobat reader (or kpdf), it displays the green quite like the web colors below. In Ghostview however, its much brighter, so I would guess that its CMYK colors. I can read that it was done in scribus, so maybe there is a source file for this floating around somewhere? The file is not useable in itself however, I cannot even open it in scribus itself.
- webcolor (for the green header on http://www.fsfe.org/, the two
greens for the webversion of the card http://www.fsfe.org/design/fsfe/images/fsfe_card.jpg) or do you think they are ok?
I think they are at least quite faithful to the actual card. Let me reproduce the values here:
Bright Green: RBG: #8dc94f HSL: 63, 135, 140 CMYK: 30, 0, 61, 21 (estimated of course)
Dark Green: RGB: #6cba4a HSL: 72, 114, 130 CMYK: 42, 0, 60, 27 (again, estimated)
I must also say that I like it a bit toned down and used sparingly, but that may be just personal preference. I have of course no idea how the Fellowship came to this color scheme and what was decided in terms of "Corporate" Identity - how the color is to be used and so on. Might be a good idea to put together at least a page that references how and where logo and colors are to be used. It should be something that fits on one or at most two pages of paper so that you can have a look and it immediately answers the design question you were having.
I'm again speaking for myself here, but I think this could help improve coherence and uniformity in the outward appearance of the Fellowship.
take care, David
Hi David,
* David Deutsch skOre@skOre.de [2008-04-10 12:04:02 +0200]:
http://download.fsfeurope.org/tmp/fellowship-customizable-leaflet-blank.pdf)
This leaflet was clearly produced for printing - if you open it with a standard acrobat reader (or kpdf), it displays the green quite like the web colors below. In Ghostview however, its much brighter, so I would guess that its CMYK colors. I can read that it was done in scribus, so maybe there is a source file for this floating around somewhere? The file is not useable in itself however, I cannot even open it in scribus itself.
Sorry, here is the scribus file: http://download.fsfeurope.org/tmp/fellowship-customizable-leaflet.sla
- webcolor (for the green header on http://www.fsfe.org/, the two
greens for the webversion of the card http://www.fsfe.org/design/fsfe/images/fsfe_card.jpg) or do you think they are ok?
I think they are at least quite faithful to the actual card. Let me reproduce the values here:
Bright Green: RBG: #8dc94f HSL: 63, 135, 140 CMYK: 30, 0, 61, 21 (estimated of course)
Dark Green: RGB: #6cba4a HSL: 72, 114, 130 CMYK: 42, 0, 60, 27 (again, estimated)
I must also say that I like it a bit toned down and used sparingly, but that may be just personal preference.
What do others think here?
I have of course no idea how the Fellowship came to this color scheme and what was decided in terms of "Corporate" Identity - how the color is to be used and so on.
We do not have such information for the Fellowship logo. Only for the FSFE logo.
Might be a good idea to put together at least a page that references how and where logo and colors are to be used.
Yes, that would be very good. I can give you all the stuff we have, but those are mainly the logos in differnt file format (also some bad ones, good that we learnt and did it better with the FSFE logo).
It should be something that fits on one or at most two pages of paper so that you can have a look and it immediately answers the design question you were having.
I'm again speaking for myself here, but I think this could help improve coherence and uniformity in the outward appearance of the Fellowship.
I agree entirely. Would you be able to help with that? Perhaps we can merge it with the FSFE style guide which Nils started? We can also think about making it on a website, so if people are interested or have some ideas making a wallpaper, poster whatever they can look up?
What do you think?
Best wishes, Matthias
Am Donnerstag, den 10.04.2008, 12:29 +0200 schrieb Matthias Kirschner:
I must also say that I like it a bit toned down and used sparingly, but that may be just personal preference.
What do others think here?
I only care about having the same green everywhere. I don't care for which green exactly.
Obviously it would make sense to take the "hardware" that we already produced as a reference, like the card, the pins, the stickers, the lanyards.
(Although I can't help the feeling that some of them already have different greens)
As to Pantone or not Pantone: My experience is that if you want a printer to print something, he needs the Pantone number. No matter whether it is a flag, a T-shirt, a leaflet, or a sticker. So even though the system may be proprietary, we might not get around having the correct Pantone numbers.
Thanks, Reinhard
Hi Reinhard,
I only care about having the same green everywhere. I don't care for which green exactly.
Obviously it would make sense to take the "hardware" that we already produced as a reference, like the card, the pins, the stickers, the lanyards.
(Although I can't help the feeling that some of them already have different greens)
Me too. It can certainly help to "verify" the color being correct afterwards, but its no use if you want to tell a printer which color he is supposed to use. At least not THAT much use. As for on-screen comparison, I'm not sure how well the FSFE or Fellowship is equipped with calibrated monitors, which would certainly be needed in any form of comparison. I'm not that sure either that we need one green or even two greens fixed. It could already do to just define like one Hue that we vary on, but semi-fix values for recurring elements like the logo.
As to Pantone or not Pantone: My experience is that if you want a printer to print something, he needs the Pantone number. No matter whether it is a flag, a T-shirt, a leaflet, or a sticker. So even though the system may be proprietary, we might not get around having the correct Pantone numbers.
It may be true that most printers use software that can read Pantone Numbers and that its convenient to use, but as I said before - it depends on where you print. Few printers will have the exact color you need and buying it for small jobs is not too common (one bucket is well over a thousand Euros). Printers who have lots of colors in store ready to use are not exactly in the price range of the FSFE either I should think. So that gets us to printers who emulate with CMYK (which is only feasible in small jobs anyhoo) and that again defies the need of making the Pantone Number the central point of reference. Don't get me wrong though - it surely IS a point of reference, but I question its usability.
take care, David
Am Donnerstag, den 10.04.2008, 13:47 +0200 schrieb David Deutsch:
As for on-screen comparison, I'm not sure how well the FSFE or Fellowship is equipped with calibrated monitors, which would certainly be needed in any form of comparison.
What I'm talking about is not exact color matching. What I'm talking about is having *somewhat* the same color for everything.
Look at the first two banners on http://www.fsfe.org/en/fun/artwork/banners - they have a completely different kind of green, and the button on http://www.fsfeurope.org/ is yet another green.
Thanks, Reinhard
Reinhard Mueller wrote:
What I'm talking about is not exact color matching. What I'm talking about is having *somewhat* the same color for everything.
Look at the first two banners on http://www.fsfe.org/en/fun/artwork/banners - they have a completely different kind of green, and the button on http://www.fsfeurope.org/ is yet another green.
Indeed. Well, I would say if the exact replication is not an option, we really should work on a guide. And as I have said before - count me in on that, we (or I if nobody else joins in) just need reference material.
-David
Matthias Kirschner wrote:
Sorry, here is the scribus file: http://download.fsfeurope.org/tmp/fellowship-customizable-leaflet.sla
Ah yes, so it really does use the CMYK values that you referenced before.
I have of course no idea how the Fellowship came to this color scheme and what was decided in terms of "Corporate" Identity - how the color is to be used and so on.
We do not have such information for the Fellowship logo. Only for the FSFE logo.
Any public info that you can link me to?
Yes, that would be very good. I can give you all the stuff we have, but those are mainly the logos in differnt file format (also some bad ones, good that we learnt and did it better with the FSFE logo).
Sure thing, that would help.
I agree entirely. Would you be able to help with that? Perhaps we can merge it with the FSFE style guide which Nils started? We can also think about making it on a website, so if people are interested or have some ideas making a wallpaper, poster whatever they can look up?
Oh, sure. I'm not entirely comfortable with just "making something up" from the data I get, but if that is the best you think we can get...
take care, David
Hi David,
* David Deutsch skOre@skOre.de [2008-04-10 13:54:53 +0200]:
Matthias Kirschner wrote:
Sorry, here is the scribus file: http://download.fsfeurope.org/tmp/fellowship-customizable-leaflet.sla
Ah yes, so it really does use the CMYK values that you referenced before.
I have of course no idea how the Fellowship came to this color scheme and what was decided in terms of "Corporate" Identity - how the color is to be used and so on.
We do not have such information for the Fellowship logo. Only for the FSFE logo.
Any public info that you can link me to?
Not public, but I uploaded all the artwork to http://download.fsfeurope.org/artwork/ UN: designers PW: MakeUsPretty
As I said there are a lot of bad files for the Fellowship logo. I do not know if those .ai files help. But I think I uploaded everything we got from the designers.
I agree entirely. Would you be able to help with that? Perhaps we can merge it with the FSFE style guide which Nils started? We can also think about making it on a website, so if people are interested or have some ideas making a wallpaper, poster whatever they can look up?
Oh, sure. I'm not entirely comfortable with just "making something up" from the data I get, but if that is the best you think we can get...
Nils started with it in the Styleguide, and there are also files in FSFE-Logo which should help a bit to have a structure. Perhaps it would be best to make a html guidline? Or what do you think?
Best wishes Matthias
* Matthias Kirschner mk@fsfe.org [2008-04-11 13:04:38 +0200]:
Any public info that you can link me to?
Not public, but I uploaded all the artwork to http://download.fsfeurope.org/artwork/ UN: designers PW: MakeUsPretty
And some stuff is here: http://www.fsfe.org/en/fun/artwork. But this is also from Fellows, and not official.
Best wishes, Matthias
Hi all,
* Matthias Kirschner mk@fsfe.org [2008-04-11 13:04:38 +0200]:
Not public, but I uploaded all the artwork to http://download.fsfeurope.org/artwork/ UN: designers PW: MakeUsPretty
[...]
Nils started with it in the Styleguide, and there are also files in FSFE-Logo which should help a bit to have a structure. Perhaps it would be best to make a html guidline? Or what do you think?
I just phoned with Markus about it. He is currently doing drafts for posters (see the four drafts in http://download.fsfeurope.org/artwork/fellowship_posters_2.pdf).
We have one color guideline for FSFE's logo: http://download.fsfeurope.org/artwork/FSFE-Logo/colour_guidelines.pdf
Markus used the following colors from the color guide:
GREEN MIX for Fellowship Dark 70C / 0M / 100Y / 0K 107R / 179G / 64B (PANTONE 7489 C)
GREEN for Fellowship bright 30C / 0M / 80Y / 0K 208R / 244G / 0B (PANTONE 584 C)
The strange thing is in http://download.fsfeurope.org/artwork/Fellowship/Info:
[...]
Colors:
- SmartCard bright green: 50,0,100,0 (CMYK), or Pantone: 376C - SmartCard dark green & logo: 70,0,100,0 (CMYK), or Pantone: 361C - RGB logo color: 99,152,41 (Web only)
"SmartCard dark green & logo" has the same CMYK colors as "GREEN MIX" from FSFE's logo. But the Pantone color differs. So we should check which pantone color we should use. (We could ask the original designers about that).
"SmartCard bright green" should get the same CMYK, Pantone and RGB colors as "GREEN" from FSFE's color guide.
He suggests that we define one darker green (what we currently use on the web buttons), and have CMYK and Pantone colors from it. So if we need a darker green we can use that (e.g. for the web). IMHO that makes sense. So we do not have thousands of greens (and people do not just convert with gimp or other programs and get strange results).
What do you think?
Best wishes, Matthias
* Matthias Kirschner mk@fsfe.org [2008-04-11 15:19:35 +0200]:
GREEN MIX for Fellowship Dark 70C / 0M / 100Y / 0K 107R / 179G / 64B (PANTONE 7489 C)
This color is perhaps the best for the Fellowship leaflets, or what do you think?
Best wishes, Matthias
* Matthias Kirschner mk@fsfe.org [2008-04-11 15:58:05 +0200]:
- Matthias Kirschner mk@fsfe.org [2008-04-11 15:19:35 +0200]:
GREEN MIX for Fellowship Dark 70C / 0M / 100Y / 0K 107R / 179G / 64B (PANTONE 7489 C)This color is perhaps the best for the Fellowship leaflets, or what do you think?
If nobody disagree until tomorrow 10:00 am, we will order leaflets with that green.
Best wishes, Matthias