Keith Hoover asked expert colorists to rate color batches three times over a week. They rarely agreed with each other, and each person's own decisions changed—colors accepted Monday were rejected Wednesday. He argues organizations must measure their current analog process before assuming it works.
We may be good at designing, we may be good at a lot of things, but we're not very good at making consistent decisions on subjective matters. I ran some color departments and we had all of our people look at standards and batches, a series of standards and batches, and just tell me, are these acceptable? Just don't, you don't need to tell me the differences, would you pass this? And then do it 3 times over the course of the week. Well, we knew of all of those batches that these people were making subjective decisions on, we knew that half of them were well within tolerance, they were acceptable because we had measured them, and the other half were way over tolerance, they were really bad matches. And yet what we found with this group of expert colorists was that over the course of the week nobody agreed with the numbers, Nobody agreed with each other, and nobody agreed with themselves. So what they passed on Monday, they failed on Wednesday. So pretty low baseline. You can't assume that the current process is perfect. In fact, probably in any of these processes that we tackle in a digital manner, we need to get a baseline of where we are in an analog manner.
