Everything you need to know about fan decks and colour cards — materials, colour accuracy, finishes, production and ordering.
A fan deck is a compact, portable tool that presents an entire colour range across pages bound in a fan format, allowing multiple shades to be compared side by side. It is the standard colour-selection tool in the paint and coatings industry.
A colour card is a physical collection of colour samples used as a technical and commercial reference, available as a multi-page booklet, a single card, or a set of mounted chips. It is used for quality control, production repeatability, and colour-range presentation.
Colour card is the general term, referring to any physical collection of colour samples. A fan deck is a specific type of colour card, bound in a fan format for quick consultation and sales presentation. Every fan deck is therefore a colour card, but not every colour card is a fan deck.
There is no minimum number of colours: a fan deck or colour card is built around the client's own colour range, however small. For large-scale projects, colour cards containing over 1,500 shades have been produced in a single tool.
Fan decks and colour cards can be produced on a wide range of substrates, both paper-based and non-paper:
The difference between printed colour and coated colour lies in formulation precision and the nature of the finish. Printed colour reproduces the shade graphically through a printing process. Coated colour applies the actual paint onto the substrate, creating a coating with real film thickness that faithfully reflects the original formulation, resulting in superior colour accuracy.
Fan decks can be assembled using different binding solutions: screw or rivet binding, in a case, in a rigid container, or ring-bound.
Colour cards can be produced in all standard print formats, as well as posters and point-of-sale displays. Available configurations include: accordion (concertina) fold, half-fold/bi-fold (4 panels) and tri-fold/Z-fold (6 panels); saddle-stitched or perfect-bound booklets; and punched sheets for ring binders.
Available finishes include: matte, gloss, satin, metallic, pearlescent, textured and fluorescent. On both wood and wood-effect embossed paper, the finish can be transparent or opaque. On aluminium, powder coating is available.
Colour accuracy is measured against the ideal zero — the customer's own colour standard. Each sample is measured with a spectrophotometer, which sends the data to the formulation software to correct the recipe. The accepted tolerance is ΔE 0.3.
For ageing resistance, particularly against yellowing in off-white shades, an acrylic resin is used instead of nitro resin, which is less stable over time and more prone to yellowing under light exposure. Impact and abrasion resistance can be tested on the customer's specific request.
Yes, fan decks and colour cards are produced for any sector: decorative, industrial, automotive, fashion, cosmetics, as well as projects dedicated to new colour trends and brand institutional colours.
The minimum order quantity is 250 copies.
From project approval, production takes 30 working days for the first delivery.
Yes. For the colour section, two copies are provided to the customer: one is returned, signed, for approval or any corrections. The same process applies to the graphic layout, which is returned for print approval.
Always. Every tool is custom-made, exactly to the customer's specifications.
Yes, there is no upper limit on production volume: runs of up to 400,000-500,000 copies have been handled.