Last week we shared “Introducing the Open Color Ecosystem” which was prompted by presentations we’ve been sharing with ColorMetrix clients and prospects since early May. The Open Color Ecosystem presentations evangelize our vision of a color supply chain in which sharing color is easier and less expensive for all involved. Also, we are a company committed to social media so we share some of the details of these trips via our Twitter accounts (@ColorMetrix, @raffel, @ShelMKE) and have even selected the hashtag, #ColorTour2012 to make the color tour 2012 easier for you to follow.

Don’t evangelize until you can see the whites of their eyes

We share a great deal of content and information about our products and services via digital channels but sometimes there is no substitute for face-to-face presentations. So we’ve chosen to take our show on the road. Since early March, we have presented our new Open Color Ecosystem to about 100 people in small group and one-on-one meetings. We’ve been refining the presentation as we go and the message of the color tour has been well received.

For the rest of the summer, our main focus will be reaching as many folks as we can by car. So far we’ve traveled to St. Louis and Chicago, as well as Portage and Grand Rapids (Mich).

Where we are going and how you can see us too

Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be in Wisconsin’s Fox River Valley and then we are headed to Cincinnati, Louisville and finally the NBM Show in Indianapolis. If you are in any of those places and would like to meet with us, please reach out and let us know. We’ll do our best to work you into the color tour 2012 schedule.

We’d love to bring the #ColorTour2012 Open Color Ecosystem presentation to you. It only takes us about an hour to get through the presentation unless you want to allow time for a more in-depth demonstration of the different software modules involved.

As the year goes on …

Later in the fall, we’ll be at GraphExpo in Chicago and SGIA in Las Vegas. We’d be happy to work with partners to spread word of the Open Color Ecosystem. We already have partners we share color data with openly and are looking to add others as the year goes on.

Just use our contact form to let us know how we can help you.

It’s time to introduce an Open Color Ecosystem.

Let me explain. Our industry is ready for an Open Color Ecosystem, which the entire industry helps build and maintain so that we can demystify color; not only for ourselves but for the entire color supply chain.

Who really owns color?

No one person or business can or should have a stranglehold on color information. This just makes it more difficult for most supply chain participants to do their work while one entity profits from the difficulties it creates.

Sure businesses can and should own ways to name and classify colors. However, we think those classification systems should be as close to free and open as possible. After all, nature created all the colors in the world, not man. Those who formulate inks and other colorants are also entitled to a return on their investment. I’ve seen what goes into producing inks and pigments. For example, it’s quite easy to burn through a million dollars or more developing a new ink set that is deemed safe for use in food packaging. However, an entity should not “own” the color red. Instead they should own a way of naming a specific red and a way of producing that red for use on food packaging.

Distributing color

There are businesses that build and maintain systems to distribute color information (as we do). Color distribution systems are important because they enable quick and easy (ideally even transparent) access to color information up and down the supply chain. As you might expect, we feel businesses of this nature are also entitled to a return on their investment.

Measuring color

There are businesses that design, develop and manufacture instruments to measure color. While in theory all instruments should measure color exactly the same way, the reality of it is that they don’t. For example, the chart below shows the measurements of hundreds of different color swatches made by two spectrophotometers from different manufacturers intended for the graphic arts use. The measurements were made on the same day in the same room by the same people.

• Avg. DE Diff(CMC 2:1) .62
• 95th percentile DE Diff 1.36
• Peak DE Diff 2.29

Because instruments are manufactured in different ways (while still adhering to international standards), these differences are to be expected but they do create issues with the free and open sharing of the measured values of the colors by all needing to keep the color supply chain rolling along.

So we created an innovative software called Normalizer to minimize the manufacturing differences between instruments of multiple manufacturers. This next chart is the same set of measurements as above but run through Normalizer to make one of the instruments approximate the measurements of the other.

• Avg. DE Diff(CMC 2:1) .45
• 95th percentile DE Diff .95
• Peak DE Diff 1.68

The above numbers are just our starting point; Version 1.0 if you will. We are already working on ways to improve upon these results and will keep you posted. Also, consider that a tool like Normalizer can eliminate the need to create multiple ink drawdowns that must then be distributed to multiple printing plants. You gain the advantage of not requiring a printing plant to purchase a specific instrument (raising their operation costs) as well as cost and time savings of shipping color swatches to all the plants that print your work.

Key building blocks for a true OCE

A true Open Color Ecosystem requires that the supply chain own the colors and be able to distribute them to other supply chain members in clear and meaningful ways even if the same instrumentation will not be used to measure color throughout the process.

Normalizer is a key piece of technology that will enable this to exist.

What other tools do you think an Open Color Ecosystem needs?

It all started when we published Color is a feeling. In that blog post we said, “What the designers care about is walking up to the product on the store shelf and feeling the way they intended you and me to feel.” This got us thinking about ways to reach the design audience who ultimately can and does drive the use of color process control technology.

Enter Pinterest

The next week we published “Color catches the eye, seals the deal.” As Shelby wrote this article about selecting her personal care products based in large part on the color of the items, we were also ramping up our ColorMetrix Pinterest account. The image she chose to use with the post displays nicely on Pinterest.

As you look at the ColorMetrix Printable pin board you’ll currently see this image right down the middle of the page. While the image will move as additional pins are made to the board it will continue to be a visual focal point for two reasons. First, it’s a colorful image and second it’s a long and narrow image which sets it off. We’ll come back to the image size and shape in a moment.

I’ve also created a personal Colorific pin board on Pinterest. As I find colorful and fun images, I pin them for later review. Sometimes those images are associated with blog posts I want to go back and read and this is just another way to remind myself to head back and check the post out. If you head over and look, you’ll see Shelby’s “Color catches the eye, seals the deal with purchases” images there as I repinned it. This just increases the ultimate reach of the blog post because many people who are intrigued by the image click to see where it came from. That click leads them back to this blog.

Building images for Pinterest

Last week we shared the “Measure Twice, Print Once” infographic that we created to support an earlier blog post by the same name. This image was explicitly designed to look good and stand out on Pinterest. As a matter of fact, you’ll find it on both my personal and the ColorMetrix pin boards and referenced earlier in this blog post.

We are just getting started with Pinterest but believe that it’s a key part of our strategy to market color as a feeling instead of as a set of numerical coordinates.

Sometimes the easiest way to explain how or why a process works is to show it visually. Today, we are sharing why color verification is important in your printing and process control system.

About a week ago, I needed to replace some of my personal upkeep products; namely a hair dryer, a nail file, some eye shadow and a hairbrush. When I was making my purchases, I really didn’t think much about my choices. I am usually a quick and efficient shopper; not liking to spend much time in any store. I want to get what I need and get out. In fact, I distinctly remember taking a few work calls during this particular shopping trip. Clearly, I wasn’t paying too much attention to what I was buying.

Later, as I was spreading out my new upkeep products on the bathroom counter, it occurred to me that my subconscious must have made my choices at least partially based on color. I jokingly took pictures of each and told the story on my personal Twitter account with the hashtag #UpkeepColor. It was late at night when I did this but the responses I received were both amusing and interesting.

Without even realizing it, color had caught my eye and sealed the deal.

Perfecting packaging

Some of our biggest clients at ColorMetrix are in the printing for packaging industry. Many of them have national brand name products and rely heavily on color recognition. It matters to them that their brand colors are consistent and that their packaging is of good quality.

When we visit our client’s facilities, the same mantra is heard again and again: They want to continue to provide consistent color quality and they want to keep improving on the way that it is maintained.

Making ‘good enough’ better

While we provide solutions for color verification, we are constantly looking for ways to improve upon them. My experience during my shopping trip for #UpkeepColor only reminded me how important color is for printing and branding. Color catches our eye and, like one of our recent blog posts pointed out, encourages emotion and feeling.

Therefore, we commit to the fact that our solutions will never be “good enough.” We will always be striving to improve upon them; not only for our client base but for the industry as a whole. This year, we are working on some exciting enhancements to our products. Be sure to watch for updates in the upcoming weeks.

I started out thinking this would be a technical article and I even have links to the posts and articles I was going to reference to prove it. The title was going to be something like “Clouds can be colorful,” which is a reference to the decade ColorMetrix has spent building solutions to store color information on the internet (or in the cloud to use today’s buzzword de jour). Here are my three techie links – if you’re into that kind of thing – and then I’ll get into the touchy, feely side of color.

The techie side of color in the cloud

• Brand Color Management Has a Bright Future
• Color Strategy, Automation and Cloud Computing
• Centralized Color Database Servers

The touchy, feely side of color

Hopefully, you skipped right over those three articles for which I almost wrote a fourth musketeer. Instead, today I want to write about the fact that designers pick colors for a lot of reasons and almost none of those reasons are based upon technology.

Instead, color is about evoking a feeling from you, the potential consumer of a product or service. Should you choose to think I make this stuff up as I go along, please take a look at this article I found on Twitter while taking a break from writing this post: Pinterest Rival Fancy Gets Fancier With “Match By Color” Visual Search.

In a nutshell, color makes us feel!

Sometimes those feelings are good and sometimes those feelings are bad. At other times, the feelings are neutral. In this political season, think how much time our candidates spend picking the color of their shirt or their tie. Think about the people of the opposite sex you meet and how their hair and clothing choices affect how you respond to them. I mean, we have blond jokes for a reason, right?

Respecting the designers choice

Color in the cloud matters because it allows us to provide verification that the color specified by the design process makes it to the finished product untainted. Most designers could care less if we hit the right L*a*b* values within the specified Delta E tolerance range. What the designers care about is walking up to the product on the store shelf and feeling the way they intended you and I to feel.

The fact that we do that with L*a*b* and Delta E is meaningless to them. Those are the tools of our trade. The correct color delivered on the store shelf is our product. Just as Twitter and Facebook provide a conduit for us to communicate, color in the cloud is a tool for delivering the right color to the store shelf.

Don’t mix up tools and technology with the deliverable

Those of us in the color verification game are typically buried so far down in the color supply chain that designers have no idea who we are or what we do. Trust me on this. I’ve spent the last three years getting to know the design community. But here’s the thing: they care about what we do. They just don’t want to know how we do it. Our deliverable to them is the right color every time, all the time. It’s as simple as that.

Photo Credit

Please stop throwing “bad” proofs and prints in the trash bin. I really want you to stop doing that and put the cash saved in your money jar. Today I want to explain how color verification and process control are just like the old carpenter’s saying “Measure twice, cut once.” While it oftentimes takes only one measurement to be sure your print will “pass” quality muster, I can virtually assure that two measurements will get you there more than 99 percent of the time.

Back to the carpenter’s story

Many years ago, I helped my father build a darkroom in the basement of my childhood home. Yes, we used to process black and white as well as color film and prints back in the day; but that’s an entirely different story. I was in my teens, young and impatient. I was measuring and cutting 2x4s as fast as I could so we could get the darkroom done. Sure enough, eventually I cut several to the wrong length (too short). We had to return to the lumber yard for more wood. On the drive, my dad calmly and patiently explained to me that carpenters live by the rule “measure twice, cut once.” He also mentioned that this rule helped to avoid extra trips to the lumber yard and reduced allowance for a few months.

That’s right. He basically took the funds to pay for the additional wood out of my money jar.

In the same way, if you’re producing bad proofs and prints and not utilizing some form of color verification and process control system, you are doing the same thing I was. You’re not taking the time to remeasure when necessary.

Most times one measurement will do

The cool thing about the computer age is many repetitive tasks become easier. You can measure a control strip on each proof (or a periodic test print) and get an overall pass or fail status. As long as you get a pass, there should not be a reason for a second measurement. Proceed with production and filling the money jar with profits.

If, on the other hand, you get a fail, it’s time to slow down and figure out why. Once you determine the source of the measurement failure, take corrective action and re-run your test print. With time and practice, you’ll almost always get a pass the second time around and can then return to production and filling the money jar with profits.

This piece was posted on JimRaffel.com on Jan. 23, 2007. You can view the original here. It has been re-purposed for this site.

One of our goals is to prove to customers that their proofs meet the desired standard of quality. In other words, we strive to verify proof quality. In January, we discussed using process control (such as our ProofPass.com software) to find the sweet spot of your proofing system. We also talked about how to keep it there and continually improve the system. It stands to reason that once you have put that process in place you now have proofs that consistently conform to a known quality level. Now it is time to let the world know that your proofs are verified to be consistent and repeatable based upon objective factual information.

The most important part of a verification system is the label we attach to the proof that either contains a snapshot of the quality data or – better yet – points the proof viewer to a website where very detailed information about the proof is easily obtainable. The label also needs to contain an overall Pass/Fail status for instant evaluation by the viewer of the proof.

The process of verifying a proof is important because a proof that is signed off as being ok by the end customer is a contract. Your internal customer for that proof (your pressroom) now has to match the proof in order to live up to the terms of the contract. The pressroom will check that verification label to make sure that the proof is within the standards established by the process control system. When proofs are consistent and repeatable, it is much easier to consistently and repeatedly match them on press. Also, when they are having difficulty matching the proof on press, they are more likely to focus on the press rather than blaming a proof that conforms to standards they have matched time and time again in the past.

This review first appeared on JimRaffel.com on March 9, 2012. It has been repurposed for this blog. To read the original, please click here.

Awhile back, our CEO Jim Raffel saw a post by Jeff Jarvis on Google+ announcing the release of his Kindle single “Gutenberg The Geek” (Amazon affiliate link via JimRaffel.com). At ColorMetrix, we develop color verification software for the printing industry so reading this book was like natural instinct.

About the book

“Gutenberg The Geek” is a quick read, but it’s chock full of great insights for any entrepreneur. While Gutenberg has always been the inventor of moveable type and the printing process; it’s interesting to view him as an entrepreneur.

In his work, Gutenberg figured out the right combination of paper, ink, impression pressure and dozens of other variables. Isn’t that what entrepreneurs do? They figure out what needs figuring out. They never quit, never give in.

Some quotes from the book

“As with good software, functionality comes first; beauty is a feature.”

After hundreds of years, the Gutenberg Bible can still be found at the Cary Library. These pages are still things of beauty, but that is only because the quality of the printing is second to none. Will what you are building survive you?

Here, too, was a lesson about the nature of technology: “Printing, like social networking, can be used by good actors and bad. In that sense, technology takes no sides.”

It’s not about the tools; it’s about who and how they are using them. When you read Mr. Jarvis’ single, you will find it interesting to see what Gutenberg printed before he got around to the Bible.

“How much longer will there be room for physical impressing ink onto paper? Perhaps by the 600th anniversary of Gutenberg’s press in 2040 or thereabouts, presses will be relegated to museums. There’s no shame in that.”

There is no shame in a 600-year run of a piece of technology. Sure, it saddens us to know we could live to see the demise of the printing industry, but we have to prepare and adapt to confront that eventuality.

“Gutenberg The Geek” is a great, quick read. It’s less biographical and more a book that makes you think about how to approach your own entrepreneurial pursuits.

Photo Credit

Last week, we demonstrated the ColorVerify process control solution at the International Sign Expo (ISA) in Orlando. We partnered with Mutoh America to develop and promote ColorVerify and they have provided us with space in their booth at several trade shows over the past year to help promote the new product offering.

We’ve also noticed that trade show and event coordinators have been using social media more actively and consistently to engage with attendees. We’ve been a part of that and we will continue to follow this trend for future events and trade shows.

To be effective, have a plan

Our social media strategy generally begins months before a significant event. After several email exchanges, phone calls and even onsite meetings, we come up with a plan together that will benefit both companies’ interests.

The ColorVerify plan resulted in a mix of print, social media and live demonstrations at the show. Then both companies cross-promoted the event across various platforms to effectively get the word out to a wider audience.

Video is vibrant communication

The inclusion of video in your promotional materials and coverage of events can be vital to your social media success. For our purposes, video is a large part of our marketing arsenal. We see video working best in these ways:

Promotional and/or training: Videos are great for “how-to’s.” ColorMetrix has its own YouTube channel and you can find several “how-to” videos about our products. The most recent video listed is the same one you can find on our home page and the one we played in Mutoh’s booth at ISA in between our live demonstrations. This time we even burned it to a CD along with some educational literature so that attendees could take it with them.

Quick and easy explanations: During ISA, we took a short, 30-second video of the beginning of our CEO Jim Raffel’s demonstration. Those 30 seconds answered a very simple question: Why use ColorVerify? This video was posted on Twitter and Facebook during the show to let attendees know about the demos and explain quickly why they might be interested in stopping by the booth.

Sharing with those who can’t attend: We gave at least a dozen live demonstrations of ColorVerify. But what about people who might be interested in the product but couldn’t attend the show? There’s no need to worry because we shot video of the complete demonstrations as well and, as soon as it’s all edited, we’ll be uploading that to our YouTube channel too. (We wish we could share it with you today but we’ve only been back for two days. Social media takes time, folks!)

Cross promotion is great, but don’t spread yourself too thin

Again, we are fortunate to be partners with Mutoh because we were able to promote all of our products, services and announcements on our various networks. Working trade show booths is hard work. You’re on your feet for 8+ hours a day giving demonstrations and answering questions. It’s unrealistic to think you’re going to be able to post everything on every network.

Since Twitter is more immediate (and because ISA had an event hashtag to follow and a Twitter wall of postings), we handled that network on site at the show. However, photos and video with information were sent back to our home base and an employee who stayed behind posted them to our Facebook page. This strategy was part of our planning well before the event took place.

“Always be marketing.”

Our CEO Jim Raffel was heard repeating this mantra several times throughout the show. But what does it mean?

To us, it meant more than what we have already mentioned. Engaging with the show coordinators and attendees was also at the top of our priority list. Below are some examples.

Celebrating 60 years: Mutoh celebrated its 60th anniversary with a 90-minute party in its booth on the second day of the show. Attendees received free refreshments and lots of giveaways. Both companies tweeted out announcements about the party to ISA attendees, making sure to include the event hashtag so that they ended up on the show’s Twitter wall. We ended up with a great crowd at the party that afternoon.

Happy hour: Each day, ISA hosted a happy hour at the show and provided free beer at stations around the exhibition hall. It was a no brainer to help promote that.

You ran out? We have some!: ISA was so well-attended this year that they actually ran out of lanyards for attendees by the second day. We saw ISA tweet that out and knew Mutoh had plenty of lanyards at the booth. We let attendees know that they could stop by and pick up a Mutoh lanyard. It was fun to walk the show floor for 30 minutes on the last day of the show and notice all the Mutoh lanyards milling around.

New contests: This year, ISA had a best new product and best green product competition. Mutoh had a product entered in each. The awards were decided through attendee votes by texting codes to a certain number. At first, we tweeted out descriptions of each product with the code and number on how to vote. Then we designed a sticker (which Mutoh printed right there at the show) with all the information on it for both products. Again, it was fun to see these stickers floating around the show floor (and even on our marketing coordinator Shelby’s back!).

It’s not over when it’s over

ISA might be over, but we aren’t finished with it. We still have more photos to post, videos to edit and some general follow-up sessions to determine what worked, what didn’t and what we can do better.

What are your thoughts on using social media at trade shows?