Any colour type, as long as it’s solid – CMYK vs Spot colour printing

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. Depending on the circumstances, there is the potential for a tiny amount of mis-registration between the 4 layers of ink.

Creating brown requires all 4 colours to be mixed, 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 a bit of a mess.

When printing body copy a single colour is always best, black is obviously the standard choice for most applications in CMYK printing. If particularly small, 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.

Much better!

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.