Evorrah · Design OS Lab · Estudio de Color · La decisión
Scheme 09 of ten. One hue at two values, the dark member carrying the wide band and every mark of ink on the card.
The ten-pinks study asked two questions — how much brighter, and which pink. This page is the answer to both: #CC1991 over #E977C3, hue 320°, held in the monochrome-ribbon structure the study never touched. There is one card here rather than eleven, because the choosing is finished.
What the choice actually buys, and it is not only the colour. The delivered suite sets its accent in champagne #C9A96E, which measures 2.08:1 against the marfil — under the 3:1 that even display type needs, which is why the venue line on the shipped invitation reads as decoration rather than as the first fact on the card. Fucsia measures 4.73:1 on the same paper. It clears the 4.5:1 that body text needs, not just the display threshold, so for the first time in this suite the accent colour can carry the small tracked labels — the course names on the menu, the section heads on the programme — without being darkened into a second, sadder version of itself. The colour got louder and the card got easier to read in the same move.
And it is not the refused pastel. The direction rejects “colores pastel infantiles (rosa, celeste, menta)”. A pastel is high lightness with low chroma — a colour watered down toward white. Fucsia sits at lightness 0.45 and chroma 0.78: dark enough to be ink, saturated enough to be a decision. The test is run again at the foot of this page against the hexes the card below actually paints.
The card
Everything but the colour is the study's card, unchanged: the arch, the 13% column on the left, the ranged-left setting, the ghost E bleeding off the right edge at nearly the height of the page, and every word.
Catedral
Metropolitana
Buenos Aires
Renata Molina
& Javier Salas
tienen el honor de invitarles
a celebrar el bautizo de su hija
Molina
Domingo 11 de Octubre
12:00 Horas
Faena Hotel · Puerto Madero
14:00 H
Confirme antes del
27 de Septiembre
Invitación · A5 148 × 210 mm · arco die-cut · cotton rag 400gsm
Measured, not judged
Generated at load from the hexes the card above actually paints, beside the two colours it replaces — the delivered suite's champagne, and the garnet the pink study started from.
| Colour | Hue | Chroma | Lightness | On marfil | Carries | Bands separate | Pastel? |
|---|
Said plainly, before anyone prints it
None of them is a reason not to do it — the owner chose it and the suite is built. They are the three things that would otherwise be discovered at the proof stage.
One · the ribbon
A against B measures —, where the garnet the study started from measured 2.32:1. The column therefore reads hotter and slightly flatter — more like one bright band with a lighter thread in it than like two.
It is above the 1.25:1 the suite requires and it is a deliberate consequence of going bright: at this chroma there is simply less room between a hue and its own tint. Worth seeing on paper before the run.
Two · the direction
The direction's third refusal is “fondos oscuros o tonos fríos” — dark or cool grounds. At 320° fucsia is on the cool half of the wheel, and the study flagged exactly this when it presented scheme 09.
On nine of the ten pieces it does not bite: fucsia is ink on warm marfil, and the ground never changes. The one place it does is the envelope liner, which floods the accent edge to edge — the only surface in the suite where the chosen colour is the ground. It is built in fucsia for consistency and it is the one plate to approve on paper first.
Three · the press
A pink this saturated cannot be hit by a standard mix; it wants a fluorescent-based spot ink. That is a cost line and a longer proof, and it is true of anything in the magenta half of the study — the same note the ten-pinks page ended on.
The compensation is that this suite needs one spot colour, not two: A and B are one hue at two values, so the light band is a tint of the same plate rather than a second ink.