If you follow me over on Instagram you might have seen a series of photos I posted about Spoonflower’s new color profile that they adopted earlier this spring. It was a complete surprise to me when I got an order of fabric in designs that I print all of the time to see that some of the colors in my designs shifted dramatically. Here’s what I mean. The colors I expected are on the top; the new fabric is the colors on the bottom.
For some designs this might not really matter, but when I sell these zip bags in my Etsy shop, my customers expect to get a pink bag when they choose a pink bag, not one that’s the color of grape candy.
I spent a lot of time talking to Spoonflower’s tech support and their philosophy behind making the color shift is to make the colors that print better match the colors that show on your screen. I think this is an impossible task because everyone’s screens are completely different. This is a photo I use in classes a lot when I teach about fabric design. It’s the same exact file pulled up on my laptop screen and my phone screen. They look wildly different. If I have everyone in class open this same file and if we step to the back of the room, we see 15 different shades of aqua on 15 different screens. So I think what they are trying to do is an impossible task, but I totally understand that it’s important to their average customer. You want to get fabric that looks like it does on the screen when you order it. So I don’t have an argument with what they are trying to accomplish, but rather how they went about it.
I don’t expect this shift again any time soon, and I totally understand that with print-on-demand that there is going to be some variation. But some of the colors I was working with were more than just a “little variation”.
I decided that the best (and certainly not easiest) solution for me was to re-color my designs. Some of these zip bag designs I have been making for years, so they “should” be a certain color. So I got a new colormap so I would have a physical copy of what the new colors looked like when printed and I could easily compare to the colors I was used to.
I started by making a spreadsheet and recorded the main color for each of the designs. For example, the “Be-ewe-tiful friendsheep” design below is #7473BE in my original design file. That’s a lilac purple color. But instead of printing as a lilac color, the new fabric I got was cornflower blue. You can see the old and new versions on the left in this picture. Those are the same HEX code but printed before and after Spoonflower’s software update.
Next, I put my old and new colormaps side by side. That’s what you see at the top of this post. I found the original color (#7473BE) and then found a new color on the new colormap that I thought best matched the original one. In this case, that was #9777D0. Then I changed the color in my file to the new HEX code. Repeat this for about 40 different designs.
Then I uploaded new versions and re-printed all of my re-colored designs. On the right above, you can see the original color version and underneath is the new color version. The new lilac is slightly warmer, but it’s perfectly acceptable to me as a little variation. Most of my new colors worked out great. I have a few I need to try again. It has taken me about 15 hours so far, 6 weeks of diagnosing the problem and waiting for samples, and 4 yards of re-printed fabrics to get most of them back to printing the colors I expect them to.
The thing that’s the most frustrating about this whole situation is that in the end it is going to probably be about 20 hours worth of work that no one but me is ever going to know about or benefit from, that I certainly wasn’t planning for in my schedule and that I am not getting paid for. My Etsy shop is super low on inventory because I had to do all this work behind the scenes. Today I am sewing up some of the successful samples so I can re-stock a few things in my shop, re-photograph a few that I couldn’t get a color match, and then I’ll sit down to revise again on a few others. In my last newsletter, I talked about ripple effects and this is certainly a great example.
If you haven’t printed anything with Spoonflower in a while I recommend you get a new colormap and order a swatch of a few designs, especially if you have ones that are predominantly pink, purple, or cool blues.
