Thanks again for clearing that up. I appreciate you're input on these matters jdanek.
Just a comment in regards to my company's brand guide. I'm not comparing printed material, I'm comparing color codes. Each and every CMYK code is a mismatch except from the blacks, so when I compare the PMS codes and the processed codes in the brand guide, the latter is always off compared to my color guide. Since the mismatch is so consistent my guess was that the designer(s) had gone out fishing for a different processed version of those PMS colors than their Pantone guide was generating straight of the bat so speak, just to try and make it more in tune with what they had in mind. My best guess. Just wanted to point that out in case you tough I was visually comparing colors only and not numbers.
When browsing my Pantone Color Bridge Plus Series I suddenly discover that a small portion of the PMS colors are referred to differently than most of them are. For instance, I found Orange 021 C and another that didn't have any digits at all, its just referred to as Warm red C. Why is this do you think? Why are they suddenly leaving the number structure?
What if a publication use both C and U papers in the same issue? Is that common or advisable at all?
I also wonder if PMS really is more accurate in terms of color results than CMYK in modern printing? I briefly had a chat with the printer that does a lot of the company's material and he said PMS was always 100% but with CMYK he needed to run some tests and manually adjust the machinery occasionally to hit the right colors. He also said they were able to mix up to ten PMS colors! But what type of colors are those? Isn't that out of gammut so to speak? Or out of guide to put it differently. You wrote earlier that Spot colors are very efficient in that they should not shift, does this mean they could just keep adding and mixing colors, and is there yet another reference guide for wider colors like that?
If I can, I also want to touch the subject of the TOYO system that you mentioned briefly earlier. I don't know if this is your home ground but most printers seems a bit foreign to that system, or at least they express little experience in working with it. Some years ago I was talking to a graphic designer that did printed stuff and he was very pleased to show me some very red and bright orange colors that came out extremely saturated. It looked very nice, he used those colors on some Grotesk typefaces, the letters were all embossed and had a glossy effect. I asked him what those colors were and he replied that he had used some TOYO spot colors. Is this too expensive for commercial printers cause it's not a run of the mill production? Is TOYO a system that caters more to artists that don't care too much about the cost of an artistic expression?