Color Accuracy in Graphic Design Home Computing & Color Facts & Printing Presses

                                                     

Colors can also vary between presses or digital printers, depending on their setup or calibration, so if you print materials at different times or on different machines, they could appear different.


In many aspects of your graphic design, such as your company logo, you want to ensure that your colors are as accurate and consistent as possible across different media, printing processes, and monitor displays. You also want to strive for as much color control as possible among the different elements of your brand that you have printed when using different printing processes. This is done by comparing your Pantone color choices to their four-color equivalents, for example, to ensure that the two are as close to matching as possible.


  The Computer Monitor Varies Slightly With Colors

The average computer monitor will show slightly differing colors depending on how the computer is set up, the type of monitor (for example, flat-panel LCD monitors tend to show colors as more blue), how the brightness/contrast is adjusted, and many other factors.

    Inkjets and Home Laser Printers Do Not Have the Professional Printers Color Range

Inkjet and home laser printers, while great for convenience, often do not have the color range that professional printing machines do. This is most obvious in the case of bright colors, especially dark or complex colors (colors made up of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK) all mixed together), and in the tones of blue, aqua, and purple.

    Web color vs. printed color:
    The color of your logo and/or any other graphic elements on your website may be different than the colors on your printed materials

this has to do with the color palette that websites use in their graphics (see the article RGB vs. CMYK color), with the color palettes that the web browsers use (see web-safe color, below), and with your and your clients’ monitor calibration.

    Web-safe colors are available, meaning that the colors will look the same regardless of a viewers’ monitor type

provided that their brightness and contrast settings are set to the same levels. There are millions if printable colors and only 216 web-safe colors, thus we advise treating website colors differently than printed colors, and we suggest that you choose both a web-color palette as well as a printing- color palette for your business identity.

    Professional printing technology:
    Colors can vary between printing processes.

If some of your materials are printed with a four-color digital or traditional printing process and others are printed using the Pantone color system, some of the colors may not match owing to the differences in the processes (see our article on CMYK printing vs. Pantone color printing).