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Why talk about colour? A relatively common, and sometimes tricky question. “Why does my corporate blue look different to what I saw on my screen, then printed on the office inkjet, and then different again when we open the box from the commercial printer?”

This question illustrates the real challenges colour presents in an office environment and warrants the need for an explanation. Hopefully this helps…

your PC Screen:

Your PC uses and emits light as red, green, and blue (RGB) pixels to display colour. I bet if you opened the same colour photo on a number of different pcs in your office, the colour would be different. Even in our office here, we have a number of calibrated macs and they have subtle colour differences even with the same synchronised colour profile settings! My mac is a bit older and the white is not as white as a newer macs.

your Inkjet Printer:

Uses “wet” inks that get absorbed onto usually, cheap or highly absorbent paper. These type of printers generally try to emulate RGB screen colours. Not bad for the office but they don’t compare very well at all with printing industry standards – CMYK process or Pantone Matching System (PMS).

Inkjets do a good job of printing photos, only when setup correctly and printing on expensive photo paper.

your Laser printers:

These printers use “dry” powders or toners that use heat to seal the “ink” on top of the paper. These printers can get closer to the commercial CMYK/Pantone range but can fall over in the blues, some greens and oranges. Most people couldn’t be bothered calibrating the printer to the screen. Lasers print black, graphs, and flat colours very well but not amazing for photos. One client brought a printout from their laser printer and compared it to our laser print, the differences were quite significant – even when using exactly the same PDF file!

So generally speaking, the 3 above mediums and methods are going to produce 3 different and unpredictable results before it even gets to the commercial printer.

our Commercial offset printing:

These businesses use offset print machines often worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. They use both the “process” cmyk and PMS colour matching systems. The ink is a wet ink, and gets mixed either by machine or by hand depending on how old-school the printer is. A good printer is worth their weight in gold.

The CMYK process or breakup is: Cyan (like a rich sky blue), Magenta (like a strong pinky/red), yellow and black. This is referred to as 4 colour or full colour process. The Pantone PMS system can print a range of colours that CMYK cant and vice versa. PMS colours can be used in 1 and 2 colour small press environments and is good when designing for and choosing corporate colour combinations with predictable results.

The advantage of commercial printing, is that we have a lot more control of the predictability of the output of colour. As inks deals with 1000s of colours not millions like light, we can have many printed resources to help us get it right.

We use special books supplied by Pantone that can compare PMS with CMYK and try to get close matches. We also use a great book called “process colour manual” by Michael and Pat Rogondino. This has thousands of cmyk process combinations that you don’t get with a PMS book, thus helping us get closer to a predictable colour result

Paper and any finishing touches also play a big part in the way colour displays. Gloss, satin, uncoated, coated, matt laminated, machine varnish etc etc. Uncoated – like letterhead or general photocopy paper – absorbs more ink, sometimes making even the crispest most vibrant photo look dull. We even interview different paper mill suppliers and ask our printers to use certain paper mills to try and get the result we want.

Even when using the same company printer, on the same press and same operator, you can still get variations for print to reprint – even if it is very subtle.

Why is the sky blue and my letterhead poo?

Blue in particular is one of the worst behaved offenders of all in the design & printing industry.

Blues on screen are often brighter, deeper, richer and bolder than the printed equivalent. Generally when you print blue, it can tend to be duller and lose a lot of vibrancy. As above, when printing on an uncoated stock such as a letterhead, blues can look black or oversaturated when compared to the gloss paper equivalent. I find from experience that gloss papers tend to do blue some favours.

Colour also has meaning and connotation. Often corporates choose blue, as it is a safe colour no matter how it reproduces. That’s another topic for discussion another time. Just a thought…if the sky was normally pink, I reckon pink would be the most common corporate colour.

Blue colour - as light - passes through air and is reflected more efficiently than other colours – that is why the sky is blue! To add to that, the closer to the horizon you get, the whiter the sky gets as the blue dissipates with the more air particles to has to pass through!! Some random colour facts…Apparently red is the worst colour for a car as red and UV don’t like each other much.  Purple is the most hated colour by men. Cadbury paid a massive amount to come up with their own unique trademarked colour and have created stringent reproduction standards to uphold their brand.

We need to add here, that if you want to supply artwork to us for printing which is warmly welcomed, but all bets are off when it comes to colour. Unless you are a qualified and/or experienced graphic designer, you need to be wary of the trap that colour holds for your artwork. We therefore can't guarantee any artwork that we don't produce. Even experienced designers get colour wrong!

To sum up, colour is very complex and has many variations, connotations and behaviours. You can spend years on colour, yet know so little. We can systemise  colour and still only get close and but never exact. So yes your drafts and inhouse prints will look different to the brochures you get in the box – but hopefully not too different.