I’m not sure what exactly you’re asking. It’s typical for an identity to be based on Pantone spot colors, and then specify the CMYK mixture to use when spots aren’t available, and then also to specify a completely black and white solution where no color whatsoever is available. I’ve never seen a good corporate identity that tried to be identical in every application, but the good ones are always *consistent*.

I assume when you say you’re having trouble getting gray to print with CMYK, you’re getting a color tint of some sort in the gray. You could certainly deal with that by going all the way to black, but wouldn’t it be simpler to simply define the gray as a %K (which will be a little less vibrant, but eliminates the risk of tinting)? That said, usually a gray is not intended to be neutral to begin with — usually it leans towards blue, so when you define the CMYK mixtures, you can do so in such a way that any contamination will simply make it a little more or less blue than it should be, ie by making it only a CK rather than whatever CMYK mixture Pantone says will be closest. If you’ve got 5%Y, then yes just a little bit too much on the press can make your gray look green, so get rid of the Y entirely, but you don’t have to make the whole thing black!

The issues about grey text in CMYK are explained here.

I’m not the identity nazi kind.
I don’t feel like a problem to have a full black instead of a dark grey, but I wanted other opinions !

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Oh, geez, trying to use halftoned text in body copy is a nightmare. No, don’t ever do that, it’s begging for trouble. I don’t consider that an identity issue, it’s a small text issue. You can sometimes get away with it if the text is on top of full-color halftoned images, because that way the fuzzy edges of the text and the registration errors aren’t as glaring.

If the problem is that there’s text or small detail in a logo or logotype, then the solution is to make a version that pre-screened for small sizes. That means going into Illustrator and doing it by hand, not giving it to a printer and expecting their RIP to do it for you. You’re throwing away most of your printing resolution if you simply hand off text to a RIP and have it halftoned, because the halftone cells are much larger than you need for that application. You can manually create a gray in Illustrator that would look great and hold up even to printing on newsprint. Nick Shinn’s example of old typefaces from the pre-halftone design era are the traditional solution, or you could do a screen yourself, or an outline with a screen, or any of a dozen other things.

The idea is that when you pass that optimized logotype on to the RIP, it sees line art that will be printed at full resolution (1200-2400 dpi), not an image it will instantly chop into enormous halftone cells, giving you an effective resolution of 100-200dpi.

What is the problem in doing the Cool Gray 10 as K=68?

Ahrr, I don’t think it will be that bad. What’s interesting here is what John actually did try, and how that looked.

What is the problem in doing the Cool Gray 10 as K=68?

You’ll still wind up with “blurry” text if you halftone small type, though of course by using only one plate you avoid the registration issues. If it’s a geometric sans over 14 pts or so, K68 *might* be dense enough to keep the characters’ outline, but I wouldn’t want to risk my money on it.

The type was set in Dax, 10pt.
Nightmare.

I said before I would post scans. I’ll do it later today

nobody will ever use K:68 for text then.

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