Issue link: https://nbm.uberflip.com/i/1491554
6 4 G R A P H I C S P R O • M A R C H 2 0 2 3 G R A P H I C S - P R O. C O M S I G N D E S I G N | M A T T C H A R B O N E A U S I G N A G E & P R I N T I N G Matt Charboneau started his career in the sign industry in 1985 as Charboneau Signs, later changing it to Storm Mountain Signs. In 2017, he published the Pre-Sale Sign Survey Field Guide, and he also provides sign design training at his site: LearnSignDesign. com. Contact him at matt@ stormmountainsigns.com; LearnSignDesign.com or 970-481-4151. Verifying Substrate Colors in the Field How painting by numbers can help with consistency I t's late, you're late, and your Sherwin Williams Paint Code book and your Pantone book are both sitting on your desk, next to the folder you forgot to grab with all the code details, but you don't have time to go back for it. As you pull into the parking lot to meet the owner of the new liquor store at the strip mall, the overcast skies seem to be robbing what little available light there was left in the afternoon sky, and you panic just a little because one of the key points that you needed to establish was the existing color of the stucco wall. Without your SW paint book, you're stuck without any way to match the color by way of a paint code or color-ref- erenced number. Oh well, you decide to quickly snap a few shots of the stucco wall in hopes of figuring out the color later, back at your designer's office. It's overcast, it's late in the afternoon, the horizon is a bright orange and gray, and you are taking photos of the stucco wall in hopes of matching the wall color for the race- way that the sign will need. I think this is where the big lever is pulled and the floor drops out from under you, and you fall into a tank of hungry sharks with laser beam guns mounted on their heads. e next day you present your wonderful photo of the stucco wall to your designer. "I can't use this," your designer mumbles … "I can't match this photo." is puzzles you, as it wasn't usually a problem in the past. Your designer then shows you an example of how the sun's light is affected by the atmosphere, which bends the light and turns it orange — which is where our sunset and sunrise colors come from. at shift in the sun's color is Every color darkens outdoors at a distance, which means our eyes perceive a darker shade of that color the farther away we stand from it, and depending upon the time of day, the color could shift as much as three places up or down the color spectrum due to the Kelvin Shift.