A subject which often causes confusion for many of our clients is colour, so we thought we would give you a short guide to colour and how it works.

When we talk about colour within design and print, there are three terms which crop up time and time again.

RGB

RGB stands for Red, Green and Blue. This is the colour system used on screen. When you are watching the tv, or working on your computer, the picture you see is made up from red, green and blue light, what is know as additive colour. It creates clean, bright colours in millions of tints and shades.

CMYK

CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. This is the subtractive colour model and is used by your desktop printer and also by professional printers. It works by mixing four different colour inks by printing tiny dots of each colour very close together. By mixing these inks in this way, all the colours you see in a full colour photo can be created. The colours tend to be less bright and clean that those created using RGB. CMYK can be a bit limiting when it comes to matching very bright colours, or when trying to get a colour match. For example if your logo is a specific shade of blue, and it is crucial that it is always that colour, then CMYK is not the best printing method to choose. The colours made vary greatly from printer to printer, and can be unreliable.

Pantone

If a colour match is crucial to you, or you want to use a very bright or metallic colour, then using a Pantone colour is the best option. Pantone colours are premixed (a bit like buying a tin of paint off the shelf in B&Q) and are always accurate (within 3%) so whatever you are printing and when, the job should always be the same colour. You can use a Pantone colour alongside a normal CMYK job and many printing presses handle 5 and even 6 colours to accommodate this.

There is one big BUT to be aware off though. Even when using Pantone colours. The paper you choose to print on will make a big difference to the way the colour appears. For example exactly the same colour printed onto an uncoated paper (for example for your headed paper) will always appear darker than when it is printed onto a gloss coated stock (for example for a glossy leaflet). The reason is that the uncoated paper will absorb more ink than the glossy one where the ink just sits on the surface, affecting the way it appears to your eye. We can overcome this by choosing a slightly lighter colour for the uncoated jobs, so let us know if having the same colour across all your jobs is vital and we will do our best to make sure that all your jobs match exactly.

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