Part II: Rose is Rose in CMYK Color Chart

There’s a small chance that your logo has many colors, but usually, companies like to just have one or two vivid, vibrant colors in their logo. This makes it easy to recognize and easy for them to reproduce. Color standards are different for printing and Web-based images.  We use CMYK for printing and the RGB color chart for the Web. If you say you want your logo to be, say, “rose,” what exact hue of rose will you really get?  Will it always look the same shade of rose or will it look a little orangey on some printed material and purple-ish on others?  And why does this happen?  After all, rose is rose, right? Wrong.

There are three basic color models used in design; Pantone, CMYK, and RGB.  Which one you use depends on which medium you want the finished product.

Pantone Matching System (PMS)

The Pantone color system contains premixed links that create a single solid color, also known as “spot” color. There are about 1,800 PMS spot colors, but each color can be tinted (lightened) by adding white, toned by adding gray, or shaded (darkened) by adding black, so the potential count of PMS color variances is well into the millions.

Jobs printed with Pantone use pre-mixed, opaque colors to ensure that the colors are matched accurately and that the printed details are super sharp and always consistent.  The problem is that you can’t really print more that one or two colors per job; it’s just too much work.  Every color that is used must be prepared separately. Fortunately, most Pantone colors can be color-matched to CMYK.  There are just some darker shades of PMS blue that cannot be accurately translated to CMYK.  A well-known example of this is Reflux Blue.

Interesting fact: Every year Pantone releases its “Color of the Year” which is featured in all kinds of consumer goods, clothing, household items, and promotional products.  By the way, the color for 2019 is “Living Coral,” 16-1546.

CMYK Color Chart

CMYK color vector art chartFour-color or full-color process, CMYK is based on the blending of four colors: Cyan (light blue), Magenta (red), Yellow, and Key (black). It allows for detailed color matching and gradients of color by subtracting and/or layering various intensities of cyan, magenta, and yellow to achieve the desired result, making it possible to translate a given color or palette of colors, including PMS and RGB, into CMYK.  CMYK is best used for printing on paper and custom branding on products.

CMYK is represented as percentages of each of the four colors.

RGB Color Chart

For digital images, use the RGB color model. It is created by the blending of light with the absenceRGB color cube of color.  Web-safe colors are a set of 216 RGB colors that will display correctly and consistently on a myriad of monitors. Logos used for websites, social media, soft copies of presentations or reports or any digital media that will be presented on a computer or television screen are best when created in the three-color RGB model.  The three colors are Red, Green, and Blue and it works by adding and mixing layers of light to create the desired color images.

There are two hex digits for each of the three colors in RGB color representation.  On a scale where 00 (zero-zero)  is the lowest intensity of color and FF is the highest intensity.  Remember that white is the combination of all colors and black is the absence of all colors, hence the hex codes for black and white depicted in the table below.

In Conclusion

Use RGB colors for the web or TV; CMYK color chart for everything printed and PMS as an “absolute” for fashion and design.

COLOR

CMYK (%)

RGB

RGB (hex)

Red

0, 100, 100, 0

255, 0, 0

#FF0000

Blue

100, 100, 0, 0

0, 0, 255

#0000FF

Green

100, 0, 100, 50

0, 128, 0

#008000

Yellow

0, 0, 100, 0

255, 255, 0

#FFFF00

Orange 0, 35, 100, 0 255, 165, 0 #FFA500
Purple 0, 100, 0, 50 128, 0, 128 #800080

White

0, 0, 0, 0

255, 255, 255

#FFFFFF

Black

0, 0, 0, 100

0, 0, 0

#000000

 

Part I: Why Printers Need Vector Art

Part III: Decoration Methods and Techniques