For brands, color is much more than a design choice. It is a critical part of identity, recognition, and the overall customer experience. Whether that color appears on packaging, direct mail, retail signage, marketing collateral, or a large-format display, customers expect the brand to look the same.
For Thysse, an Oregon, Wisconsin-based commercial printer and brand experience provider, maintaining that consistency across a diverse range of printing technologies and substrates is an important part of delivering quality for its customers. Thysse uses the G7 methodology as the foundation of a comprehensive approach to color management, helping bring consistency to everything from offset and digital printing to wide-format graphics and packaging.
Building Consistency Across Print Processes
One of the biggest challenges facing modern print service providers is the diversity of technologies they operate. A single customer campaign might include offset-printed packaging, digitally printed marketing collateral, roll-fed variable-data direct mail, and wide-format graphics produced on materials ranging from paper and plastic to fabric, wood, or metal.
Each process introduces its own variables. Different printing technologies, inks, substrates, surface characteristics, and finishing processes can all affect the final appearance of color.
As a G7 Master Colorspace Certified Facility, Thysse has implemented a standardized approach to managing those variables. As the company explains in its article, “Mastering Color Consistency: How Thysse Uses G7 Color Management to Deliver Exceptional Print Quality,” G7 provides a common foundation for achieving visual similarity across different print processes.
That capability becomes particularly important when multiple printed components appear together. A package sitting next to a retail display, for example, may have been produced using completely different printing processes and materials. Yet from the customer's perspective, both are representations of the same brand.
The technology may change. The brand and the printed result shouldn't.
Why Color Consistency Matters to Brands
Thysse's approach also illustrates why effective color management extends well beyond meeting numerical tolerances.
In retail environments, even relatively small differences can become noticeable when multiple products, packages, signs, or displays appear side by side. Similar challenges arise when marketing materials are sourced from multiple locations or produced through different processes. The result can be a fragmented brand experience.
Consistency, on the other hand, helps reinforce brand recognition and confidence. When packaging, signage, collateral, and other printed materials share a predictable visual appearance, they work together as a coordinated system rather than as individual print pieces.
This is precisely the kind of challenge G7 was designed to address. By establishing a common approach to grayscale appearance, tonality, and print calibration, G7 creates a foundation for more predictable reproduction across printing systems. Combined with effective color management, process control, measurement, and skilled operators, that foundation helps printers manage the many variables encountered in production.
G7 Across a Diverse Production Environment
Thysse applies its color-management practices across an especially broad mix of applications. Its wide-format capabilities support retail displays, environmental graphics, facility branding, and wayfinding on an array of substrates. Toner-based digital equipment supports shorter-run collateral and sales materials. Roll-fed digital production provides high-speed variable-data printing for personalized communications and direct mail. Offset printing supports packaging, catalogs, and other longer-run applications where repeatability and consistency are critical.
Managing color across those platforms requires more than simply calibrating an individual press. It requires an organization-wide commitment to measurement, process control, and maintaining predictable output over time.
That is one of the important distinctions of G7 Master certification. G7 is not limited to a particular printing technology. The methodology provides a common framework that can be applied across offset, flexography, digital printing, inkjet, wide format, and other print processes. For a diversified provider such as Thysse, that flexibility helps connect otherwise very different production environments.
Turning Color Management Into Customer Value
Perhaps the most important lesson from Thysse's approach is that customers don't necessarily need to understand everything happening behind the scenes to benefit from good color management. They simply need their brand to look right.
Strong process control can mean fewer unexpected differences between jobs, greater predictability when work moves between devices, improved consistency across substrates, and greater confidence when multiple pieces of a campaign come together.
Thysse also points to the importance of controlling more than production. In one example, the company worked with a customer whose sales teams were independently creating and sourcing materials, resulting in inconsistencies in both color and brand content. Combining color management with a centralized brand portal helped the organization gain greater control over its printed assets while improving quality and efficiency.
It is a good reminder that color management is ultimately part of a much larger objective: protecting the integrity of a customer's brand throughout the production supply chain.
A Commitment to Color
G7 Master certification represents an ongoing commitment to process control and consistent print production. Thysse's implementation demonstrates how that commitment can translate from the pressroom into tangible benefits for brands, particularly as campaigns increasingly span different printing technologies, applications, and substrates.
The company's approach reinforces a simple principle at the heart of effective color management: regardless of where, how, or on what a piece is printed, the customer should still recognize the same brand.
Learn more about how Thysse uses G7 color management to support consistent print production.
Learn how to become a G7 Master Certified Facility here.