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 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 absence
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