A barista made me rethink my logo color choices last weekend

I was sitting in a coffee shop in Portland showing a friend my new brand board. The barista (totally uninvited, haha) leaned over and said 'your logo looks purple on our screens but blue on my phone.' I pulled up the hex codes and yeah, the same #5C6BC8 was reading totally different on an OLED vs an LCD panel. It hit me that I never test my colors across actual devices before. I just check them in Illustrator and call it good. Has anyone else run into this issue with specific color codes looking different across screens?

2 comments

2 Comments

nancy313d ago

That same hex code thing happened to me with a website header I was working on... the #2C3E50 looked straight black on my friend's iPhone but dark navy on my monitor. You need to check your colors on at least three different screens before you lock anything in. I started using an online tool that simulates how colors look on different display types, and it saved me from a few embarrassing mismatches. A good rule of thumb is to view your palette on an OLED phone, an older LCD monitor, and a newer retina display before you print anything.

noahw5313d ago

My buddy runs a small print shop and he told me this nightmare story about a client's wedding invitations. The client picked out this perfect dusty rose color on a nice calibrated monitor and everything looked great. But when the invites came back from the printer, the rose had this weird greenish tint to it on the actual paper. Turns out the color was shifting because the printer's screen showed it one way but the paper stock absorbed the ink different. He spent like three hours redoing proofs and had to eat the cost of the first batch because the client was already upset. It's wild how much screens lie to us without us even realizing it.