Pantone Colour Printing on Melamine Overlay Sheets | Print well

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• Technical Guidelines for Melamine Overlay Sheet Printing with Pantone Colours.
• How to Add Pantone Colours in Illustrator, CorelDRAW and InDesign.
• Why Melamine Crockery manufacturers are shifting to Pantone Colours.

Shree Printwell Offset Pvt Ltd is a long-established Ahmedabad printing press serving melamine crockery, packaging and export clients with colour-critical work. We print large volumes of melamine overlay sheet printing jobs using Pantone colour printing on melamine sheets for crockery manufacturers across India. Over the last two years, as more countries prefer India as a manufacturing base, we have seen a clear shift: a growing number of melamine crockery manufacturers now move their melamine sheet printing to Pantone shades to secure consistent brand colours in every production cycle.

Why Melamine crockery manufacturers opt for 4 colour + Pantone printing

Colour consistency:

HORECA and Export clients always expect same colour output in the all the production cycles of crockery manufacturing.

Rise in Customized/Branded melamine crockery:

As dinner set marketing is fading away lot many hoteliers, companies, caterers & event planners are looking for their customized design options which leads to involve their brand colours or colours which are in trend which demand pantone shade printing with regular 4 colour printing in overlay paper printing.

Consumer design liking change:

from last few years there are very few design would have launched with floral patterns, so many elements in designs. Current trend is very minimalist design approach with some solid colours involvement and at same time clients also expect consistency in colours which they choose and that consistency demands pantone shade printing in melamine sheet printing.

If you would have observed we have seen huge rising demand in quick manufacturing demands for high ticket wedding, for corporates kitchens.

Melamine Overlay paper is thin and delicate:

Melamine overlay paper gsm range from 43 gsm to 60 gsm and which is very difficult to print with lot many offset printing companies in india because offset printers are not so use to print such light gsm paper and because it such low in gsm to get the desired and consistent colour output on melamine overlay paper is difficult with traditional offset printing. So for consistent colour output on melamine sheet printing you need to opt for Pantone colour printing with traditional offset printing.

The Process to choose right Pantone shade for your melamine overlay sheet printing

Pantone has many shade cards for many substrates like coated paper, uncoated paper, Textiles, Fashion. Such pantone shade card exist because of each colour gives different visual appeal on different surfaces. So first we have to standardize that process with our Indian manufacturing capabilities of inks.

In Indian all pantone ink manufacturers are very much comfortable with manufacturing inks for coated paper because mostly pantone inks gets printed on coated papers, but our melamine overlay paper is uncoated paper. If we ask ink manufacturer to match PANTONE shade for uncoated papers firstly they will say yes but once they go through process of matching colour in first manual roll down they will surely face lot many challenges related to colour matching and that happens because whiteness of Pantone uncoated paper is different than whiteness of melamine overlay sheets.

So what is the best practice to match PANTONE colour(specifically for melamine overlay sheets):

Select pantone colour from PANTONE colour shade card of coated paper as per your requirements. Ask offset printer to create one manual roll down of that pantone shade card on coater paper once that roll down is matched in PANTONE shade card of coated papers then use same colour to print on your melamine overlay sheet printing during offset printing.

This is the process which we have developed with experience and to make process smooth and lean of offset printing companies.

Mosty of the time we always do send one manual roll down sheets to our clients for checking purpose that how their selected colour will appear on melamine overlay sheet while printing.

We are following same process for melamine sheet printing from last many years and we have been quite successful in doing same thing and our clients are also happy process and at same time our PANTONE ink supplier also. We have believed and also tried if ask ink manufacturer to develop ink for uncoated paper specifically for melamine overlay paper they go through lot of difficulties because of paper texture and paper whiteness. So we had opted for the process which is scalable, lean and result oriented. 

“…standardising Pantone shades for melamine crockery helps your brand colour stay consistent across every production batch.”

File Preparation Technical Guidelines for 4-Colour + Pantone Overlay Sheet Printing

Prepare your artwork only in professional design software such as Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign or CorelDRAW. Keep your document colour mode in CMYK and use Spot Colour wherever you want Pantone shades in melamine overlay sheet printing.

Basic rules for offset printing file preparation:

• Work in CMYK from the start. Avoid RGB in the final file.
• For every Pantone shade, assign a Spot Colour with the correct Pantone code (for example PANTONE 158 C).
• Use 3 mm bleed on all sides of the design and keep all important text/logo elements at least 3–5 mm inside the final cut size.
• Total ink coverage for CMYK areas should stay below 280% – 300% to avoid drying and set-off issues on 43–60 gsm overlay paper.
• Flatten complex transparencies and check for any unwanted overprint before making the final PDF.
• Export a Press-ready PDF (PDF/X-1a or similar) with spot colours preserved. Do not convert Pantone spots to CMYK at the export stage.

How to add Pantone colours in your design file

Below are simple working steps for three common design tools used by melamine crockery manufacturers and design agencies.

1. Adding Pantone colours in Adobe Illustrator

1. Open your artwork file in Illustrator and confirm File → Document Colour Mode → CMYK Colour is selected.
2. Go to the Swatches panel.
3. From the Swatches panel menu choose:
   Open Swatch Library → Colour Books → PANTONE + Solid Coated
   (or another Pantone book you are using for your melamine project).
4. A Pantone panel will open. Click on the required Pantone shade; it will be added to your Swatches panel as a Spot Colour.
5. Double-click the swatch to open Swatch Options and confirm:
• Colour Type: Spot Colour
• Swatch name clearly carries the Pantone code (for example PANTONE 158 C).
6. Apply this swatch to all design elements that must print in that Pantone ink (logos, borders, solid areas etc.).
7. Before saving the final file or PDF, open Window → Separations Preview and confirm that your Pantone spot appears as a separate plate along with C, M, Y, K.

(This matches the behaviour shown in your Illustrator screenshot where “Colour Type” is set to Spot Colour.)

2. Adding Pantone colours in CorelDRAW

1. Open your document and confirm the document is set to CMYK.
2. Select the object you want to colour.
3. Open the Outline Pen or Fill dialog (depending on whether you are setting stroke or fill).
4. In the colour dropdown, choose Palette Libraries → Spot → PANTONE+ Solid Coated-V5 (as shown in your Corel screenshot).
5. Pick the required Pantone shade from the list.
6. Corel will add that shade to the Document Palette as a spot colour.
7. Repeat for other objects that need Pantone colours.
8. Check Window → Dockers → Colour Palette Manager (or Object Properties) to confirm the Pantone colours are defined as Spot and not converted to process CMYK.