Just saw a weird color mismatch in a hotel lobby in Nashville

I was staying at a newer hotel off Broadway last weekend and noticed their design system fell apart at the edges. The lobby signage used a bright orange from their brand guide, but the digital kiosk screens showed a dull peach that clashed hard. Has anyone else run into issues where physical and digital versions of a color don't match up, and how did you fix it?

2 comments

2 Comments

simon_black13d ago

Honestly, was the orange in their digital files set up for RGB instead of the right print profile? That dull peach sounds like straight-up color space bleed.

mitchell.shane13d ago

Ran into this exact mess at a coffee shop chain I did some consulting for. Their brand orange on the physical cups and napkins looked great, deep and rich, but on their mobile app it turned this weird washed out salmon color. Turned out the designer who set up their digital assets was working in CMYK and converting to RGB without checking, so the color space was doing all sorts of garbage math behind the scenes. What finally fixed it was getting a color calibration tool and dialing in the HEX codes directly from a print sample under good lighting, then testing it on three different phone screens to make sure it held up. The dull peach is a dead giveaway of a bad conversion somewhere, especially if that orange was originally picked for a physical medium.