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SMS BLOCKS
Designers in our times are used to working with so called custom colour palettes.
Each customer typically has his own colour palette, which consists of a number of colours that are used for his logo and any artwork that is used for his visual identity.
Some designers may not like the idea of making brand colours public, - perhaps to protect the unique combination of colours that they chose for the visual identity of a customer.
In many cases, where a design consists of a fixed number of colours (for instance a logo) it is an obvious advantage to keep all the colours of the design together from the start - to merge them into a fixed colour palette that we refer to as a BLOCK - which in fact is a colour palette with clear instructions on how the colours should be reproduced correctly.
SMS colours are based on complexed colour management, which sounds way too complicated for many designers and even printers to even bother to try them out.
We are in fact juggling spot colours that are digital by origin, prepared for different types of paper/substrates and media, which also need to be aligned to different white points (in print) and for different print standards/outputs. This means in short that each SMS colour has several different variations, to ensure that the colour remains visually correct, no matter where you see it.
This is exactly why our SMS CMYK colours need to be ordered individually, depending on:
-
Media (paper/substrate type)
-
White point
-
Print standard
To simplify things a little for designers, we have come up with a simple and practical solution that we call SMS BLOCKS.
One obvious advantage of the SMS BLOCK approach, besides being less expensive than the normal approach, is that it makes it considerably easier for the designer to replace any or even all colours within a block globally - i.e. it can be done without making a fuzz and without having to contact everyone that has ever had to reproduce the colours within the block in the past. It is also possible to add new colours to an SMS BLOCK without having to change and update the entire brand manual of the customer.
Here is how it works
So we start off with the exactly same approach - i.e. you can finish your initial design in sRGB format and use your SMS colour cubes see www.spotmatchingsystem.com/gettingstarted when setting up your proposal for your customer to keep track of which SMS colours you are using, - which he or she can view online on his or her laptop or mobile display for initial approval, - of the artwork and it's colours.
Once the brand owner has approved the artwork and it is time for you to set up the brand manual with the details of your design, you can choose to let the SMS BLOCK format protect (block) your SMS colour combination from being copied - at least by just anyone.
So here you simply need to send your SMS colour cubes to sms@spot-nordic.com and request that your chosen SMS colours be transformed to an SMS BLOCK.
Let's say that your logo has 3 SMS colours and let's say that you wish to be able to print it on coated paper, according to Fogra 51 and uncoated paper, according to Fogra 52.
If you happen to be an SMS subscriber, you would of course not have to
pay for the colours anyway, since up to 4 brand colours are included in
the subscription in any number of CMYK variations you need - see
www.spotmatchingsystem.com/services.
Each additional colour
you need to add to a brand beyond 4 colours costs an extra EUR 100 pr. year and could of
course simply be added to your SMS BLOCK, which can contain up to 10 SMS
colours.
If the case is that you are simply ordering the colours according to our non-subscriber pricelist, the cost of 3 standard SMS colours would be EUR 30 pr. colour pr. papertype/print standard or EUR 90 pr. papertype + print standard for all 3 colours, which would make the cost for coated and uncoated paper (say Fogra 51 and Fogra 52) a total of EUR 180 for this logo/artwork - and from then on EUR 90 for each new CMYK variation you might need to order for all 3 SMS colours.
By requesting (needs to be done from the beginning) your SMS colours in SMS BLOCK format however, you will receive all your colours (3 in our example) in one file, every time you order.
That doesn't mean that you have to use all of the colours for every job - you can use one, two or three.
You pay the full price of EUR 30 pr. colour for the first CMYK version and then EUR 60 for additional CMYK versions of the block, whether it contains 2 or 10 colours!
In our example, instead of having to pay a total of EUR 180 for a total of 3 colours defined for 2 papertypes/print standards, you would only need to pay a total of EUR 150 - and you would strictly speaking never have to reveal the actual name of the SMS colours used within your design since each SMS BLOCK is issued a unique ID number that you can use for your brand standard, instead of the SMS colour names, in our example it's SMS BLOCK 36.
For maximum convenience we include all required technical information within each SMS BLOCK for proper usage:
SMS BLOCK 36 is the name of this colour combination, which you can use for your brand manual.
ISO COATED V2 is the CMYK icc profile that your printer has instructed you to use in your job preparation.
FOGRA 51 (in the middle) means that the white point of the production media is close to the white point of Fogra 51.
FOGRA 39 is the print condition requested by the printer/Printshop commissioned to print this job.
Using the SMS BLOCK approach in brand design looks like this (or you can simply pick out standard SMS colours).
In this scenario the designer/brand owner already has picked colours from another colour matching system that he would like to replace with SMS colours.
In this case, the designer decides NOT to reveal the actual SMS colour names of his or her colours.
The advantage of this is that it is possible to make this brand manual available online for anyone to see and should the designer at any time decide to replace colours within the block or add new SMS colours to the block, it is possible to do that without having to change anything in the brand manual itself, except perhaps the box at the bottom showing all the colours of the customer.
It remains SMS BLOCK 36.
Contact sms@spot-nordic.com for more information or quotes.
We welcome you to visit the SMS shop to subscribe or buy SMS standard products.
Start by creating your account whether you prefer to subscribe or not.
Contact sms@spot-nordic.com for ordering services or custom SMS products. Please include your customer ID.
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