Let’s start with spot colours: spot-colour printing delivers brighter, more vivid results, but with a narrower colour range. Spot colours are catalogued through the Pantone Matching System (PMS), the industry standard for matching ink colours. Printers use a Pantone swatch book to match the colours specified by the graphic designer.
CMYK four-colour printing, on the other hand, is used to print items involving colour photographs, images, or full-colour designs. Four-colour process printing uses the four base colours known in the industry as CMYK — Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. Artwork is separated into these four base colours and broken into tiny overlapping dots to produce the final colour. If you looked at a four-colour process element under a magnifying glass, you’d see the tiny dots that make up the images or text. But you’ve probably already seen this for yourself…
Should my packaging be printed in spot colour, CMYK, or both?
The answer to the question above will depend on how important it is for your packaging to match a brand colour exactly, weighed against the cost of doing so. The number of colours used on your packaging will clearly affect its cost — a straightforward two-colour job will obviously be cheaper than a CMYK job, or a CMYK process combined with spot colours.
If your graphic designer has set up the artwork to print your packaging in CMYK plus two spot colours, that’s six colours in total. This will clearly be more expensive than printing your packaging in CMYK alone. (By the way, those 2 spot colours can also be printed and matched using CMYK.)
That said, in certain cases where a brand’s colour is highly distinctive, and where it carries major brand significance for a particular colour to stay vivid and never shift in any way, it may be worth asking your graphic designer to adjust the design to use spot colours.
How do I decide whether to use spot colour or CMYK?
To decide which type of printing to choose, it’s important to involve your packaging supplier at the very start of your packaging purchasing process. That means talking to your printer before engaging a graphic designer’s services to begin the design.
On any packaging design project, it’s always good practice to speak with your packaging printer before consulting your graphic designer. That’s because the first and most important question with any packaging is its structure. This needs to be tested and confirmed before approaching a graphic designer looking to begin design work. We can provide your graphic designer with a key line — a detailed outline of your proposed packaging structure — that they can use to build their design in the correct format for printing and folding. (In fact, we should provide this: graphic designers aren’t always technically knowledgeable enough on this front, and they don’t need to be. It’s right there in the name — GRAPHIC! Designer.)
Once the structure is agreed and the outline has been handed to your target graphic designer, you can begin reviewing the proposed design with your graphic designer, marketing department and purchasing staff. While your design is still at the proposal stage, ask your graphic designer to give you the proposed specifications for the purpose of getting a print quote. At this stage, you can see what your designer is proposing — it might be a simple 3-spot-colour design, or a design using 4-colour process plus 2 or 3 spot colours.
At this point, it’s advisable to get a quote from your printer to see what these options will cost. But it’s important to look not only at cost, but also at how you want the printed packaging to look. Once you’ve seen these examples, you’ll be in a good position to decide whether investing in spot colours is worthwhile, or whether it’s best to ask your graphic designer to format the design for CMYK printing only. Many graphic designers will naturally want to use spot colours to achieve an exact match. But, as with any project, all the important factors need to be weighed against each other, and a decision made that serves the overall best interest of selling more of your products.