What are Spot Colors

What are Spot Colours?
How print colours differ from what you see on-screen

Spot colours or Pantone colours are often used for corporate identity because they reproduce accurately.

Spot colours are pre-mixed inks that look exactly the same when printed. E.g. If your identity uses a particular shade of orange, you can be assured that the orange will be consistent in all stationery and printed documents.

Professional designers use a Pantone colour swatch book (pictured right) to select suitable colours for corporate identity, rather than rely on their computer monitor.

It would be difficult to reproduce the same orange using four colour printing (standard print process using cyan, magenta, yellow and black) because of ink variations and different printing processes.

Using a couple of spot colours for identity is also more cost effective. Running two spot colours on a printing press is much cheaper than running 4 colours.

Print vs Screen Colours
Printed spot colours often differ from what you see on-screen because of the way colour is reproduced.

colour on a Computer Monitor
Monitors, scanners and digital cameras create images using three colours: Red, Green and Blue (RGB). These colours are generated by technology using phosphorus tubes, liquid crystal displays etc. You can see up to 16.7 million colours on a monitor.

Printed Colour
Colours on the printing press are usually created using four inks: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (CMYK). Printed colour cannot reproduce all the colours you see on a monitor.

It is always wise to discuss colour reproduction with your printer and ask for a colour proof of your project prior to printing

Further Info
Branding
Corporate Identity
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