Over the last two weeks I have been working on a promotional campaign for Pantone. The idea of the project was to create a set of three postcards to display samples of Pantone's spot colors. First, I needed take photographs. They needed to be colorful, because I would be taking my color samples directly from the photos. I took a trip to The JC Raulston Arboretum, which is a botanical garden that is administered by NC State University. I was able to find some lovely flowers (and bugs!) that worked very well. Here are the results: 

I then had to do a color study for each of the photos. A color study is done by sampling several areas of the photo to obtain color swatches. Once I sampled my areas, I then had to find a matching Pantone color. For the purposes of this project, I chose my colors from the PANTONE + Color Bridge Coated Library. Here are what my color studies looked like:

Once I had my options for colors, I opened my photo in Photoshop and changed the color mode to CMYK. The instructions were to use only 3 spot colors to transform the photograph. The method I used for applying my spot colors was changing my image mode again to "Multichannel" and then changing the colors in the "Channels" window. Because you changed the color mode to CMYK it gave you 4 channels (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black), but you are only using 3 spot colors. You can either delete a channel or use the same color on 2 channels, or rearrange the channels. Play with it until you are happy with the results. Here are mine:

These images would be the front of my postcards. I now had to create the backs. The USPS has very strict guidelines on white space so I had to make sure I followed this template:

The required design elements were the three spot color swatches, the Pantone logo, my business logo, and the promotional copy. I decided to promote three specific Pantone products: the Pantone Extenstion for Adobe Creative Cloud,  Pantone Studio for iOS & myPantone for Android, and the PANTONE® Color Finder. Here completed backs of my postcards.

Here are the finished products side-by-side: