When you are the designated designer for a large non-profit with a national brand you have a very clear set of brand regulations to define most of the layout of the projects. What is NOT in these regulations is some of the choices that can really help your client’s budget. The story of the way this newsletter evolved within brand is one of those examples.
Corporate brand required that this newsletter be a 2-color production. What you can notice in the spread above is color accuracy, but variations on the ink intensity. The top eight copies noticeably range from darker to lighter. Two factors play into this. One is that when I came aboard as the designer, they were using a coated sheet. Ink lays on top of that paper and has more density in color than on an uncoated sheet. So when the pressman is watching the job well, you will have a good solid coat. The other point to note is the variation to the next 2 issues. The ink is good, but the pressman let the inkwell run low and the ink saturation causes a lighter orange to show. There is a margin that you can accept and this fell in that, but I have returned jobs that the ink was so low that the color was not recognizable as the required PMS.
In the last 5 issues, the color is almost identical to each issue. This occurred for several reasons. The first reason came with a partnership I was able to negotiate with a printer. I asked 4 printers to look at the list of regular jobs we printed at YWCA every year and give us a quote. After accessing each quote and interviewing the representatives from each printer, we chose the best fit. In this new partnership, I explained the accuracy of the PMS and its value was important. I needed to put YWCA in the hands of one printer to keep their quality consistent. In order to do this, YWCA committed to print all of their work with one printer. The printer in turn would rebate to the YWCA at the end of the year as a donation to their cause. YWCA would have the flexibility to quote other printers to keep the pricing competitive. All of our projects were top quality and the printer valued our relationship as well.
Another benefit to using one printer where you have quality control is also the room to look for more beneficial ways to print your jobs to save money. For YWCA, this came through a very slight size change. See above image on the left. By reducing the page by .0125 on length and width, it actually allows the job to go to a smaller sheet and therefore, less waste and also reduces the price of the job!
Often printers will offer a 2 color job and then run it digital to save time and also in some projects it can help the cost when bidding against another printer. However, the PMS orange used by YWCA is not a color that translates to CMYK accurately. The bright orange you see in the samples turns to a dark, burnt orange color. Negotiating with printers on behalf of this client involved a clear understanding of quality control and no CMYK substitutions would be allowed without sample approval for accurate matching. Unfortunately the brand standards did not provide an accurate CMYK build so I developed this for this YWCA branch for some of the smaller projects.