Mesh tool and pantone colors.

Question

Hello,
I'm trying to make a logo using the mesh tool. I have to use pantone colors, since it will be used on a bussinesscard.
Now, I'm experiencing the following problem: I select a darker color on the bottom part of the object, and the gradient is going from dark, to light, to normal.
Why is this happening? Is it because I'm using pantones? it just looks icky.
Thank you!
Image:
[IMG]http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b338/Aetza/drop.png[/IMG]
I clicked three times, so I have three horizontal and three vertical lines. The light part is happening between two lines.

Answer 1

function(){return A.apply(null,[this].concat($A(arguments)))}
Also, I have no knowledge of printstuff.
And because of that, others here are trying to help you avoid getting yourself into trouble. Before anyone actually starts charging money for doing design or prep work for commercial print, they really should consider it their responsibilty to (what a concept!) actually be at least familiar with the printing process. Otherwise, if you present yourself as a for-print designer, you really are defrauding the customer.
Take a course at the local tech school; work part time in a press room for peanuts, just to learn. At the very least, get someone to give you a functional tour of a press room whenever you can.
It's not rocket science; it's mostly just simple mehanics. But it is also not just a simple matter of re-purposing your RGB web work. (In fact, that's backward; usually you should design for print first and then repurpose for web.)
As soon as you start talking about real ink-on-paper, you're talking about real labor and materials and real time on some really expensive equipment. Commercial offset printing is very competitive. Printing houses by necessity quote jobs according to the assumtion that jobs incomming from external preparers are built right, i.e.; that the external designer knows what he's doing. You can't expect a printing house to eat the costs involved in fixing your file-preparation mistakes.
In short, the printing world is chock-full of very bad relationships between angry designers who think they know what they're doing (often these days just because they've been doing some design work for the web) and printing houses who know they don't. Trust me: You don't need that stigma. A print designer should consider it a matter of necessity to develop very strong relationships with printing houses, based on mutual professional respect. Without that, you really won't be competitive, no matter how artfully talented you consider yourself.
function(){return A.apply(null,[this].concat($A(arguments)))}
But it really is a pantone
There is no such thing as "a pantone". Pantone is a brand; it's a company. The various Pantone libraries are just sets of standardized spot color or process color specs published by Pantone, and used to communicate colors to printing houses. Pantone is not the only set of spot colors, but it is the most commonly-recognized in offset lithography printing; it predates graphics computers by decades.
When designing a file intended for color-separation (i.e.; mass printing), your concern is whether it will be printed in spot color or process color (or, in some cases, a combination of both). In order for your file to color-separate correctly, you have to build it correctly.
And color separation is not the only issue; there are other issues that affect whether the job prints correctly, such as trapping and total ink density.  For example, spot color is by its nature less forgiving when you neglect the matter of trapping.
All printing is a matter of production economy. In the matter of process vs. spot color, several practical factors come into play, including the paper type, the specific press which will run the job, and even the nature of the artwork itself (ex: line-art vs. continuous-tone, tightness of the color registration, and others).
When designing for color-separated print, don't think in terms of "colors"; think in terms of real-world, physical inks. Basically, Your job is to deliver to the printing house a file which contains one image per ink--especially with spot color (i.e.; what far too many people think of as synonomous with "Pantone"). Don't think of a spot color as a "color"; think of it as an ink.
Offset presses have a separate ink well for each ink that will be printed. Each ink hits the paper at a different time as the sheet passes through the press. At the typical small-to-medium printing house, bread & butter jobs like business cards are usually run on smallish presses. Those are seldom more than 4-color presses, and are often 2-color presses. If, in your artwork, the number of separation colors exceeds then number of ink wells on the specific press, the job cannot be printed in one pass; the paper has to be re-run to apply the full number of inks and that entails another press set-up operation--which you pay for.
So if (as it sounds) you take the admonition to "use Pantone colors" to simply mean 'make sure all the colors you use are selected from the Pantone Swatch Library', you are already in trouble. Each time you add a color from a spot color library to your file, you are necessitating another ink well on the press.
If you've read and seriously considered the above, you'll understand that, by and large, it is rarely practical (cost efficient) to design a piece containing more than three spot colors. As soon as you need more than three colors, you should be considering 4-color (CMYK) process.
(Higher-end printing is frequently done involving more than four inks; it is not uncommon for sheetfed work to be process-plus-1 or process-plus-2 spot inks. Multi-pass jobs can involve foils, metallic inks, and varnishes. But such "glitzy" printing is knowingly extravagant and is still carefully prepared for to maximize economy within the requirements. Although it certainly can be, such extravagance is not usually the kind of thing used for the typical business card project.)
JET