You may have noticed, we love colour. We’re lucky to work with some really energetic brands and colour is a great way to help convey this energy. However, it also involves a certain amount of consideration. How does the company communicate with its audience? Is it mainly using digital methods via a website or social media, or printed materials like brochures and leaflets? If digital is the main platform, RGB offers a much wider and more vibrant colour choice. The drawback is when printed, the vibrancy of these colours often can’t be reproduced in CMYK. But what the hell does that all mean?
So what are RGB and CMYK and why are they different?
RGB (Additive colour)
RGB is an acronym for Red, Green, and Blue and is the colour system used on computer displays, TVs, mobile phones, we’ll pretty much anything that has a screen. RGB is an additive type of colour mode and when Red, Green and Blue combine in various amounts they make all the colours we can see with the human eye and more— about 9,777,216 more.
How does it work?
First, you start with black. Whatever colour you add to black, makes the darkness brighter.
Combining Red and Green makes a brighter colour again—Yellow.
Blue and Red, create Magenta.
Green and Blue makes Cyan.
When all three combine, you get White.
CMYK (Subtractive colour)
CMYK is an acronym for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key (Black is referred to as the Key colour hence the ‘K’). This colour system is used for printing and combines these four colours in varying percentages to create printed imagery. CMYK is a subtractive type of colour process, meaning unlike RGB, when colours are combined light is removed or absorbed making the colours darker instead of brighter. This results in a much smaller colour gamut—in fact, it’s nearly half that of RGB.
How does it work?
As a complete flip to RGB, CMYK starts with white. Whatever colour you add to white makes it darker rather than brighter.
Combining Cyan and Magenta makes Blue.
Combining Cyan and Yellow makes Green.
Yellow and magenta combining to make red
When all three colours are combined, well you don’t get black but more of a muddy brown. This is where the key(black) colour comes in to help create the darker shadows.
Answering your question
These differences between RGB and CMYK are the main culprit for your colours looking different on screen compared to the printed version.
RGB’s additive colour process means it produces colours and brightness that CMYK just can’t reproduce. So if you’ve chosen a colour that isn’t in the range CMYK can print, unfortunately, this means it will come out much duller than what you see on screen.
There is one solution—albeit a potentially pricey one—for printing bright colours and that’s to use Pantone colours. Pantone colours (also known as spot colours) are specially formulated inks that have a unique colour. These are generally much brighter than CMYK and also include fluorescent and metallic colours. The drawback is cost. Using Pantone colours means you need to have your stuff Lithographically printed (Litho printing), a process using printing plates applied to rollers which transfer the image to the paper. For large print runs of 1000s, this is great. However, for small print runs this isn’t cost-effective and digital printing is the best option meaning you’re back to square one.
Making the right choice
It’s all about picking the right colours for the right process. When choosing colours for a brand or a piece of design, it’s important to know how it’s going to be used or the method it will be displayed, as I mentioned earlier.
So, if you’re a digitally focused company that rarely needs printed materials—if any—RGB offers the best range of colours to help you stand out without having to worry about how it prints. For companies relying more heavily on printed materials like brochures and catalogues etc, CMYK is the better choice to make sure your colours look as awesome as they should and not dull as dishwater.
The Pantone solution
There is one solution—albeit a potentially pricey one—for printing bright colours that more closely match RGB and that’s to use Pantone colours. Pantone colours (also known as spot colours) are specially formulated inks that have a unique colour. These are generally much brighter than CMYK and also include fluorescent and metallic colours. The drawback is cost. Using Pantone colours means you need to have your stuff Lithographically printed (Litho printing), a process using printing plates applied to rollers which transfer the image to the paper. For large print runs of 1000s, this is great. However, for small print runs this isn’t cost effective and digital printing is the best option meaning you’re back to square one.
The problem is your company requirements are rarely so black and white and budget is always a factor. So what's the solution if you rely on both digital and print? The safest option is to find colours that print the way you want them, that also look great in RGB. This can be a little more limiting in colour choice, however, there is another approach.
Our approach
Instead of feeling stuck in an either/or merry-go-round, you can have the best of both worlds. Our approach to choosing colour is to offer the best solution for all outputs—colour pallets for print AND colour pallets for digital. This enables your brand to look its best whatever the application.
Now, I’m not saying these colours should be different ends of the spectrum—colour forms a huge part of brand recognition. What I’m saying is, if you want a punchy blue for your brand that works in RGB but doesn’t in CMYK, you don’t have to make sacrifices, find the closest suitable match in CMYK and define this as the print version of your brand colour. This isn’t a cop-out, this is finding the right solution for the right output.
Defined pallets in action
To give you a better idea of how this works, I've used FlyForm as a demonstration. As a brand who required both digital and printed communications, we defined colour pallets to suit both. The RGB is inevitably much brighter and punchier on screen, whereas the CMYK pallet looks dull on screen. This is how we would expect CMYK to look as it's not formulated to look good on screen. When it comes to printing, however, that's CMYK's time to shine and the 'dull' colours don't look so dull anymore. It's the case of 'you wouldn't use a spoon to cut bread', there is a right tool—or colour mode—for the right job.
Hopefully, this sheds some light on why colours behave differently between screen and print and will hopefully result in fewer colour related headaches!
