Color is important to companies and people. Everyone has a favorite color. Sports teams have team colors. Companies have corporate colors. Even gangs have colors! Some companies have done such a good job of maintaining their corporate colors that those colors are permanently associated with their brand. Colors such as Coke-a-Cola Red and Porsche Red are almost as widely recognized as their logos. This does not happen by accident.
I have worked with almost every kind of color space out there including CMKY printing presses, spot-color screen-printing, film/slide projector, TV and computer monitors as well as inkjet printers. Trying to keep a company’s colors looking exactly the same all of these mediums is impossible. So, when do you say “that’s the wrong color” and when do you accept “we can’t print that color.”
For the most part, business owners will deal with web color, 4-color and spot color printing. In general, there are about 2 million printer safe colors, 256 “web safe” colors and 16 million computer monitor colors.
Printing is a process where you put ink or die on a surface like paper. The more ink colors you use the darker it gets. Mix all the colors and you get black. 4 color process or CMYK (refers to the colors Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black) printing will allow you to print “full color” pieces like photos and gradients by mixing the colors during the printing process.
Spot colors are single colors, like buying paint for your house. They do not mix during the printing process. Both spot and process color have their benefits. In general, spot color is cheaper and you have greater control of single colors than you do in 4 Color printing. 4 Color printing is typically limited to 2 Million colors. Not all spot colors are available in CMYK.
Monitors combine red, green and blue (RGB) light on a monitor. Mix all the colors and you get white. Most modern computer monitors can display 16 Million colors or more, but more does not mean you show the SAME colors. Not all CMYK colors are available on RGB monitors.
So, someone must have figured out which colors can be used in RGB, CMYK and Spot color, right?! Well yes and your graphic designer should have a swatch book of printable colors and a color conversion utility to give you the closest RGB color.
BOTTOM LINE: Work closely with your graphic designer and printer. Let them work out the technical aspects of color selection. When choosing company colors or any set of colors, ask yourself if you will ever need to print those colors. If so, consult a printing color swatch book to find the closest printer safe color. If you choose an RGB color for your company colors, you will have to accept the fact that your printer “can’t print that color.”
