Tools of the Trade: Color Creation
These prototype models by Clariant help designers visualize the way various colors look on different packaging components.
Choosing the right color often takes the experts’ help.
By Marie Redding, Senior EditorOften, a package designer will communicate the notion of color by talking in terms of the feeling a color evokes. For instance, instead of saying a bottle looks too blue or too green, a creative person might say, “It’s not warm enough.” Communicating in figurative terms like this can sometimes pose a challenge when dealing with suppliers.
The team at ColorWorks Design & Technology Center at the Clariant Masterbatches facility in McHenry, IL, knows the importance of using visuals to communicate about color. That creative team offers several tools designed to make the color-choosing process easier.
One tool is Perceptions, an annually updated tool kit developed by Mode Information, in cooperation with Clariant, Merck, and other global material companies. The Perceptions kit is filled with materials, samples, food recipes, and stories—all selected for their relations to color trends—to provide inspiration and guidance to designers.
Another tool Clariant offers to help make choosing colors easier is packaging prototypes, which can be created in a customer’s color of choice. The prototypes are available in a variety of resins. Since 2000, ColorWorks has offered multilayer bottle, tottle, and tube prototypes, as well as prototypes of small caps. Recently, the program was expanded to include a compact case, a shot glass, and a large cap.
The shot glass is an excellent tool for testing clear resins such as PET. It has both thin and thick cross sections, which display effects similar to how a color would look on a thin PET bottle or a thick PET jar. “The benefit of such a 3-D mold is that you can fill the glass with product to see the overall effect in something resembling the finished product,” says Len Kulka, director of creative development/packaging for Clariant.
The ColorWorks team is often confronted by new color-matching challenges. One challenge arises when trying to match a color already being used on one product. “When you add a new product to a line in a different type of package, made from a different type of material, the color solution may be completely different,” says Kulka. “Different resins, molding processes, wall thicknesses, or opacity levels often require you to select from a different group of color raw materials. This means that sometimes the exact, on-shelf look just can’t be duplicated.”
To help visually demonstrate the different ways that colors look on different resins, the ColorWorks team developed a Resin Impact Guide that was handed out at the HBA trade show last September. This guide shows examples of how one pigment, such as a blue resin, would look when added to six different resins. “The visual result is six different blues,” Kulka says. “Some people think a darker color will not be affected by the color of the resin you are starting with. That’s not true. When using a pastel color, the resin is even more of an influence on the final result.”
It is wise to involve the guidance of a color house early on, Kulka suggests, before you launch that first product in a color that can’t be matched later. If you are facing this dilemma right now, one solution might be to choose a variation of different shades of the same color for other packages. Another compromise might be to recreate the color only on certain parts of the new package, such as a cap. Kulka also advises, “Remember to hit your target on the material that is the most challenging first. Then, matching the color on the other materials will be easy.”