Florida Glow skincare reached out to me looking for a designer to optimize their complex gradient design for print, as their printer was using spot color printing on black plates and couldn't register the gradient from their mockups properly.
I spent hours researching their unique printing process and came across that most experts said it is impossible to print a true gradient with spot printing, but that wasn't enough for me. So I came up with a new method that has never been done before to re-create the gradient without using any transparency or mixing the white and teal colors.
I took the original gradient and converted it to grayscale, then applied a bitmap trace of each color step, then used a vector path program to convert the solid colors into a pattern of tiny dots, clustering in the darker areas and spacing wider apart in the lighter areas; creating the illusion of a gradient to the naked eye while keeping each color printed separately.
