Using examples of design for branding & identity, packaging & promotion, publishing & editorial, information & wayfinding explore the following colour systems:
CMYK (process)
Spot Colour (2 or more)
Monochrome & Tints (solid colour and half-tone)
In order to develop a significant awareness of print production methods, you will need to identify at least 2 examples of each colour process from each of the four areas of design.
Definitions - click titles for links
Duotone is a halftone reproduction of an image using the superimposition of one contrasting colour halftone (traditionally black) over another color halftone. This is most often used to bring out middle tones and highlights of an image. The most common colors used are blue, yellow, browns and reds.
Ale Roman, editorial and publishing - link
Hairy Sack of Magic, promotion - link
MADE quarterly, edition one, editorial and publishing - link
In offset printing, a spot colour is any color generated by an ink (pure or mixed) that is printed using a single run.
The widely spread offset-printing process is composed of four spot colors: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key (black) commonly referred to as CMYK. More advanced processes involve the use of six spot colors (hexachromatic process), which add Orange and Green to the process (termed CMYKOG). The two additional spot colors are added to compensate for the ineffective reproduction of faint tints using CMYK colors only. However, offset technicians around the world use the term spot color to mean any color generated by a non-standard offset ink; such as metallic, fluorescent, spot varnish, or custom hand-mixed inks. When making a multi-color print with a spot color process, every spot color needs its own lithographic film. All the areas of the same spot color are printed using the same film, hence, using the same lithographic plate. The dot gain, hence the screen angle and line frequency, of a spot color vary according to its intended purpose. Spot lamination and UV coatings are sometimes referred to as 'spot colors', as they share the characteristics of requiring a separate lithographic film and print run.
Process Is Form
Team’s recent book – printed in 2010 and designed by Design Project – has been produced to encourage readers to analyse and consider more closely the relationship between the process and mechanics of print production and the practice of design and communication. The book is illustrated throughout with combinations of special colours and print techniques, along with photographs of industrial objects liberated from their everyday habitat. Practical and informative, but beautifully designed and printed, the book provides an excellent platform to show off Team’s printing capabilities and also demonstrates their keenness to get ‘stuck in’ to help designers realise their printed projects, no matter how complicated they may be. The extensive use of special colours (24 colours, plus different foils and finishes throughout) really gives a taste of the comprehensive print and finishing services Team can offer.
Foil, spot colour, spot UV
Bright orange spot colour
A Long Piece of String, William Wondriska, publishing and editorial - link
Luke Bott
JungeSchachtel
Jonty O'connor
Monochrome describes paintings, drawings, design, or photographs in one color or shades of one colour. A monochromatic object or image has colors in shades of limited colours or hues. Images using only shades of grey (with or without black and/or white) are called grayscale or black-and-white. However, scientifically speaking, "Monochromatic light" refers to light of a narrow frequency.
For an image, the term monochrome is usually taken to mean the same as black and white or, more likely, grayscale, but may also be used to refer to other combinations containing only tones of a single color, such as green-and-white or green-and-black. It may also refer to sepia displaying tones from light tan to dark brown or cyanotype (“blueprint”) images, and early photographic methods such as daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and tintypes, each of which may be used to produce a monochromatic image.
Elephant and LURVE magazine, branding and identity, editorial and publishing
Drew Wheeler, branding and identity - link
In colour theory, a tint is the mixture of a colour with white, which increases lightness, and a shade is the mixture of a colour with black, which reduces lightness. Mixing a colour with any neutral colour, including black and white, reduces the chroma, or colourfulness, while the hue remains unchanged.
When mixing colour light (additive), the achromatic mixture of spectrally balanced red, green and blue is always white, not grey or black. When we mix colourants, such as the pigments in paint mixtures, a colour is produced which is always darker or lower in chroma, or saturation, than the parent colours. This moves the mixed colour towards a neutral one.
The Pantone Colour Matching System is largely a standardised colour reproduction system. By standardising the colours, different manufacturers in different locations can all refer to the system to make sure colours match without direct contact with one another.
One such use is standardising colours in the CMYK process. The CMYK process is a method of printing colour by using four inks - cyan, magenta, yellow and black. A majority of the world's printed material is produced using the CMYK process and there is a special subset of Pantone colours that can be reproduced using CMYK. Those that are possible to stimulate through the CMYK process are labelled as such within the companies guides. However, most of the Pantone system's 1,114 spot colours cannot be simulated with CMYK but with 13 base pigments mixed in specific amounts.
Pantone logo
To reproduce full-colour photographic images, typical printing presses (and some inkjet printers) use 4 colours of ink. The four inks are placed on the paper in layers of dots that combine to create the illusion of many more colours. CMYK refers to the four ink colours used by the printing press - the subtractive primaries plus black.
This is the most popular printing process.
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