Sharing information about the viewable colors during the test prints.
One of the primary aims during the Printed Panel process is to help ensure your gear is printed in the colors you are expecting it to be.
Firstly, it's important to understand that we do not print in any conventional color code format (hex, rgb, cmyk, pantone, etc). There's a few reasons but the easiest to explain is that during the sublimation process the color that you enter digitally is not necessarily what the color of the final product will look like.
Therefore, we use our own color chart that shows the available colors exactly as they are printed on the final fabrics:
If you have important colors that need to be matched, then we'll need you to tell us the specific pantone color code so that we can match it to our color chart. This is a manual process by our design team: we'll take our Pantone booklet and compare it to our color chart to find the best possible match.
It's important to understand this is a manual process and, because of that, there is room for error or opinion.
In most situations and across most orders, you can trust that we'll have found a great match for your needs. If you aren't happy with our match, or for peace of mind would like to do the match yourself, we can usually offer the option to ship you a color chart (at your expense) as long as it is returned promptly once complete. Please just note that this process can add time onto the production/delivery process. If you are in a rush or have left ordering to later in the season, something that you might need to assess is if getting a shade or two closer to your ideal color is worth risking the timeline or delivery of the gear?
While the Printed Panel Process is generally very helpful, it's also important to understand that certain colors can appear different via the photos that we share with you.
Here's an example featuring probably one of the most iconic colors in college sports; California gold (pantone 123). On the test prints below, you can see that the gold looks more yellow than gold:
However, in reality, this has been matched perfectly to Pantone 123 and the result in person is perfect:
There's a few other similar examples but all that's to say: if you have question about the colors during the Printed Panel Process, talk to your sales rep and they will be able to guide you, and hopefully ensure that the result is exactly what you are hoping for.