Any colour type, as long as it’s solid
Posted May 18th, 2009.
I recently began a job for a client to design a brochure for their patient care service, the project is small budget and to be printed in CMYK only. Everything was going fine then someone said it, brown text.
While extremely accurate, printers are not 100% perfect. There is inevitably a tiny amount of misregistration between the 4 layers of ink.
In this case, mixing the 4 colours to create brown, if you imagine the layers of cyan, magenta and yellow being slightly off centre from the black, they create coloured halos around the text as pictured above.
When printing headings or large text this isn’t a problem, but applying this to a body of 8pt type has the potential to create quite a mess.
When printing body copy a single colour is always best. Black is obviously the standard choice for CMYK printing, if a coloured type is required you really should use a spot / Pantone colour.
A spot colour is single coloured ink applied to the paper in 1 pass. Obviously when ink is applied to the paper in a single pass there can be no misregistration. The result is crisp clean edged type ( as pictured above ) with no halos or irregularities.
A spot colour will add an additional cost to your design project, but if coloured body copy is required you can’t argue with the result.
