Pantone Mixing

January 3, 2019

Have you ever come in to pick up an order at MarkIt Merchandise, and noticed one of our employees walking around in an ink covered apron, staring up at the lights, and talking to himself like a crazy person? Fear not! He has not actually gone crazy (probably), he is just mixing custom ink colors.

At MarkIt Merchandise we offer a range of stock colors for screen printing, but occasionally those colors don’t match the needed color. In these cases (for a fee) we will match a custom color for you.

To match colors, we use the Pantone Solid Coated system. This is the screen printing industry standard, and it provides relative consistency between on screen and printed colors. However, every monitor and every lighting situation will alter the appearance of colors slightly.

For example, see the two pictures below. Under a true neutral (white) light the two swatches should appear identical (similar to figure 1). However, if the color of the light is skewed toward a certain color (for example in figure 2 yellow), the swatches appear different.

FIgure 1

 Figure 2

To complicate things further, the glossiness and purity of the required color can make it difficult or even impossible to match. Regardless, we do our best to match every requested color, even if it costs us a little bit of our sanity in the process.

Written by, Brad Fowler.