Case Study · Artist Editions · 2025
In Joy Puzzle Company × Holton Rower
Two printers had already tried and failed to reproduce a Holton Rower drip painting on folding carton. This is how we did it.
The brief
In Joy Puzzle Company (Brooklyn, NY) collaborates with contemporary artists to release limited-edition puzzles. For their Holton Rower collaboration, the box itself needed to reproduce a Rower drip painting at gallery fidelity — deep blues, saturated oranges, and continuous color gradients across a folding carton.
Why CMYK failed
Two earlier printers had attempted the job in conventional CMYK. The deep blues flattened to navy. The vivid oranges shifted toward muddy red. The gradient transitions banded visibly. CMYK simply cannot reach those points in the visible gamut — no amount of profile tuning closes that gap.
What Sinso did
The artwork was processed for 7-color ECG separation on the Heidelberg Speedmaster XL 75, using a press-specific ICC profile built for the substrate. A G7-calibrated digital proof was reviewed by the customer before plates were made. The final press run was measured inline against the approved proof.
The result
In Joy's own words: "The deep blues and vivid oranges in our Holton Rower collaboration came out exactly as the artist intended — we had tried two other printers first."
Have a project that needs this approach? hello@sinso.us