Explaining colors to clients

[behzad]

I wanted to know how many people here explain, colors while sending proofs to their clients. By that i mean the following.

1) colors on every monitor is different
2) what they get on color printers is different from actual press colors
3) CMYK colors will not resemble what they saw on paper or their monitor screen.

In a way by making them aware of these facts, they can become very selective and pick on the final printed material and point fingers at the designer.

Also by not telling them they, that too has its bad consequences.

What to do? Should it be in the disclaimer (final proof that they sign)?

[malephika]

Work with printed proofs instead of digital ones.

[V!N]

Explain in great detail the problems that might occur, and that you will get a sample-print from the printer, before production starts. This way you reduce the critical moments to 1 point in the proces, almost completely after you have finished the work...

[senders]

pantone has books full of colour samples, if you are going to use spotcolours. you could tear out a small sample and send that along with a print.
or (also with spotcolours) tell them the colour code in an email if you are sending a digital one. (thats what we did on my last internship)
that way they can see or look up the right spotcolour themselfs.

other then that i would explain the difference between spot and CYMK on a printed proof.

[Cone Graff]

Exactly what senders said

plus the whole point in a proof print is so the client can see the proper colour, if it's not correct it's not really a proof print.

It's not really an issue i deal with at work though, our printer prints 97% correctly

[senders]

thats a damn good printer then :D we had 1 of those plotters, you know the huge printers.
problem was, we did allot of bags, and mostly plastic. now printing spotcolours with a CYMK printer on paper and the end result being pressed on plastic with the right spotcolour, gives a different colour.
thats why we used the pantone sample book.
most problems come from yellow colours, the difference there is huge.

[mattress]

give up on print and design strictly for screen (web, dvd, cdrom, etc...) :D

[Cone Graff]

Screen is even worse than print with all those different screen calibrations there is.

Yeah Senders we have that problem too (cmyk/pms)
but i just attach a pms label from the book in those cases

[Kitboftig]

Good news