Got Football? We've Got You.
How a color-critical catch on press saved a major football program from a very embarrassing season opener.
The Job
Every year, one of the region's most recognized football programs, a university with a passionate alumni base and a rivalry as heated as any in the sport, prints an oversized season schedule designed to live on walls, desks, and refrigerators from the first kickoff to the last bowl game.
This isn't a simple postcard. It's a 9" x 12" heavy-stock piece, UV coated on both sides, laminated to survive a full season of handling, and designed to be kept. Alumni hang it in their offices. Boosters pin it to school bulletin boards. Season ticket holders put it on their refrigerators. It's as much a piece of fan memorabilia as a scheduling tool, which means the brand has to be right, including the logo, the typography, and above all, the colors.
For a program with brand colors as recognizable as a jersey number, getting the color wrong isn't a minor production issue. It's a problem that travels.
The Problem Nobody Caught . . . Until Press
The file came in approved. It had been through the client's internal review process, and by the time it arrived at Hartley, everyone on the client side had signed off.
What nobody caught was that the brand red had been specified incorrectly. It was close enough to pass a casual review on a monitor, close enough to survive a standard preflight check. But still wrong, and in the worst possible way. The color on press wasn't just off from the program's brand color. It was uncomfortably close to the red of one of the program's biggest rivals.
The press operators caught it within the first few sheets.
What Happened Next
The press operators who run the Hartley floor aren't just production workers running files through equipment. They're people who care about what they're producing. In this case, several of them were fans of this very program. They knew the brand color. They knew something was wrong before they could articulate exactly what, and they stopped the press.
The job went back to Hartley's design department. Because this is a longtime client, Hartley had the correct brand color specifications on file. The error was identified quickly: the red had been specced as a CMYK build that drifted from the program's official PMS color. The file was corrected, a new proof was run, and the press was back up and running with the right red across the full run.
The client received their season schedules on time, in the correct brand colors, with no indication that anything had ever been wrong.
Why It Matters
A color error caught after delivery means an expensive, time-sensitive reprint against a hard deadline tied to the season opener. It means a conversation nobody wants to have about who missed what and when. It means schedules going out to alumni and boosters with a rival's colors on a beloved program's brand piece.
None of that happened. Because the people running the press cared enough to stop it.
That's not a quality control system. That's a team of people who treat every job as if their name is on it. At Hartley, the press operators, the CSRs, the design department, and the bindery crew are all part of the same accountability chain. When something looks wrong to anyone on that floor, the job stops, whether it's a luxury catalog, a pharmaceutical marketing piece, or a football schedule for a program with a rivalry older than the press itself.
The Specs
- Format: 9" x 12" oversized schedule
- Stock: Heavy cover stock, UV coated both sides
- Finish: Lamination for durability and longevity
- Press: 38" European-size heatset web
- Color: PMS-matched brand colors, verified against client specifications on file
- Run length: High-volume alumni and booster distribution
The Takeaway
Got Football? We've Got You.
Your accounts aren't just accounts at Hartley. They're relationships that the entire team, from customer service to press operators to bindery, takes personally. When you hand a job to Hartley, you're getting a team that knows your brand and has the expertise and pride of craft to catch the mistake that everyone else missed.
That's what six decades of client relationships look like in practice.