Julie Shaffer is Vice President of Education and Marketing Strategies at Printing Industries of America. Each year the PIA organizes a color management conference to bring industry professionals together to learn the latest trends and technologies, network with fellow attendees, and discover how to communicate color effectively.
We were lucky enough to sit down with Julie at Color ’15 to learn more about the conference and some of the color challenges printers face today. Listen in as she shares some of the top color challenges and missed opportunities to control color that printers are facing today.
Tell us about this year’s Color Management Conference and some of the key topics that were covered.
We called it Color – Color 15 – and we’ve actually evolved this conference over the past few years to be more inclusive of folks in the design realm and branding world. That’s important because we’re focusing on end-to-end color.
This conference has been around for 18 years now, and we’ve found that brand folks are coming more and more. These are the people who really care about managing their color across various substrates and all of the various print processes, but also on the web and in video. So we’ve become more inclusive in in talking about color management for video, but there’s still a very large core of folks who come here on the print side, and also on the web.
We talk about all processes, so it’s a pretty critical conference for anyone who cares about color, but our real focus is on the folks who are concerned about the brand and their brand equity and managing that across all processes.
Why should more printers attend future Color Management Conferences?
It’s interesting you say that, because while printers have always been the core of this conference, we are attracting more printers’ customers. And we find printers are interested in coming because they’re finding the people who are going to be their customers – or who are their customers – here, and we all need to be talking the same language.
One of the real benefits of this conference is that we’re crossing the aisle, if you will, because we all have our own lexicon. I think in print in particular we have our own lexicon of words that may not mean the same thing, even though we’re talking about the same topic, as someone in design or someone who’s in brand management. So it’s really great for printers as well as for folks on the other side to come and learn about everyone’s part of what is essentially the same process.
X-Rite’s Involvement in Color ‘15
X-Rite Pantone was at the conference, both as a Gold Sponsor, and to present on current topics. Our experts also contributed articles to the PIA blog on The Extended Gamut Advantage For Printers and Why Embracing Standards In The Printing Industry Is Important.
