Creating Colorways

Colorways are alternate versions of your design in various color palettes. We offer alternate colorways in order to give the Minted customer more buying options when shopping the site.

Default colorway + 2 alternate colorways

When creating your alternate colorways, it’s important to keep the following in mind:

• While we generally require a minimum of 3 colorways, we encourage you to refer to the File Requirements table provided in the Challenge Brief to see if any optional colorways are allowed to offer more options for your design.
• Please DO NOT change your default colorway from your winning submission (unless this is specifically requested in your File Request email).
• Try to provide a variety of colors between colorways (i.e. avoid two pink colorways or an inversion of the same colors). Customers want choices and variety!
• Ensure each accessory item varies across each colorway (i.e. do not submit the same envelope for 2+ colorways).
• If your design includes foil elements, make sure you are using a different foil type for each colorway. You may repeat a foil type, but please ensure that the color of other design elements differ. For more information on creating colorways with foil elements, please see this article: Working with Foil & Gloss-Press
• We encourage fun and creative names for your colorways, and have created a Colorway Naming Inspiration List! Feel free to reference this chart when naming your colorways.

CMYK COLOR BUILDS

We have minimum and maximum CMYK color build requirements to ensure highest print quality. Colors too low in CMYK value have an unstable ink build and can result in larger inconsistencies between the screen and printed product. Colors too high in CMYK value however risk too heavy of ink coverage, and can cause ink smearing on the paper when printed. Please ensure any CMYK values in your design are a minimum of 20% total CMYK and a maximum of 255% total CMYK. 

Note: Adding a small amount of black to a light CMYK value can help it be more stable when printing (less prone to printing too light). For this reason, we updated our requirements in August 2024 to ask that your build be a minimum of 2% black as part of the total 20% minimum value.

TOOLS & PROCESSES FOR RECOLORING

1. Recoloring tool

The recolor tool is a great way to easily recolor artwork between colorways. Ensure all colors are selected in your file, and access the tool by going to Edit > Edit Colors > Recolor Artwork.

2. Creating Recolorable .tiff images

If your design includes raster images (i.e. watercolor textures), a great way to recolor this across colorways is to start by creating a .tiff file that you can apply color to directly in Illustrator.

1. Convert: Open your image in Photoshop or copy the image onto a new canvas. Convert the image to grayscale (Image > Mode > Grayscale) and flatten.		2. Adjust: Adjust the saturation of your image in the Levels panel (shortcut Command+L) by dragging the left and right input level handles.
3. Save: Flatten your image and go to File > Save As to save your image as a .tiff file. Make sure the “layers” option is unchecked in the pop-up panel.		4. Place: Place your grayscale .tiff file in Illustrator and embed the image (but do NOT rasterize). You can now apply any color to this image in Illustrator!

3. Paste-in-Place tool

To copy and paste elements across different Illustrator files while maintaining positioning, the Paste-In-Place tool is a great option as well. After copying your artwork, you can go to Edit > Paste in Place (or Shift + Command + V as a shortcut).

AVOID! SHIFTING ARTWORK

To ensure a smooth shopping experience for the Minted customer when toggling between colorways, it is critical there is no visual shifting between colorways. This means that all artwork is consistent in regards to size and placement, and the only element changing between colorways are the colors.

1. Open each file of the same type (i.e. backer files of all colorways)
2. Go to View > Fit artboard in window (or use the shortcut Command + 0)
3. Toggle between open files (using the shortcut Command + tilde (~) ) to ensure only the colors change
   
   

NOTE: Creating additional colorways by recoloring from your default colorway is the best way to ensure consistency of placement.