There’s a lot of terminology and jargon associated with graphic design, especially when referencing colour modes, so today I thought I’d break down some common terms used in the design world when talking about colour.
CMYK
What does it mean?
CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key (Key means black). Millions and millions of different colours can be made up using percentages of the above four standard colours, which is why a colours is sometimes specified as such:
The colours you see are mixed ‘on the page’.
CMYK colour most often refers to things that are printed on paper.
The upside
You can print almost every colour under the rainbow using CMYK, which means it’s great for photos and designs that have more than 3 colours. It used to be expensive, but printing in CMYK is getting cheaper all the time.
The downside
Some colours can appear dull and muddy when printed in CMYK as opposed to Pantone (orange, for example). Also, it can be difficult to match CMYK colours across items if they have been printed at different times by different printers. The robin’s egg blue you love might look a bit purple on your business card and a bit green on your swing tag. There are some colours that you just can’t make using the percentages of CMY & K (that’s when you might consider Pantone colours – see below).
CMYK is also known as…
Four-colour, Full-colour, Process colour
Pantone
What does it mean?
Pantone is a company. They developed a colour matching system that, although it is one of many, is the most widely used by graphic designers and printers in Australia.
Pantone colours, unlike CMYK colours, are essentially ‘pre mixed’ before they are printed. They are often bolder and brighter than colours mixed by the CMYK percentage system explained above. Amongst the thousands of Pantone colours available, you can get fluorescent and metallic colours.
Where do you use it?
Sometimes you’ll want a certain colour to really ‘pop’ on a printed item, or for it to be represented more accurately across a few different printed products. Corporations can be very particular about their corporate colours (remember how a certain chocolate company wanted exclusive rights to a certain shade of purple? Didn’t happen, but you can bet they use a Pantone colour to make sure every printed item of that purple is near exactly the same).
The upside
Brighter tones, more accurate colour across multiple printed items, special effects such as fluoro and metallic.
Downside:
You can’t print a colour photo (for example) in all-Pantone inks just to make it brighter.
Pantone is also known as…
PMS (Pantone Matching System); Spot colour
One-colour / Two-colour / Three-colour
What does it mean?
The ‘colour’ usually references a single Pantone colour. One-colour / two-colour / three-colour are also terms commonly used in screen printing (but we’ll cover terminology used in that industry in a separate post).
Traditionally, one-/two-/three-colour print jobs were cheaper than printing in CMYK. (This is not the case so much now, unless you’re printing a very high volume [1000s of copies]). You would haveprinted in limited colours to keep printing costs down.
The upside
Working with a limited colour range does force a designer to get creative with their colour choice, and nowadays can help give designs project a retro look.
The downside
Everything on the page has to be printed in tones of the Pantone colours you chose.
One-colour is also known as…
Monocolour and single-colour are other names for one-colour.
What does it mean?
RGB stands for Red, Green and Blue. Millions of colours can be made up of different percentages of the above three colours – BUT, the thing that distinguishes RGB from CMYK though, is light. The R, G and B are basically coloured light sources, which is why RGB is used when talking about on screen colour (e.g. computer and TV).
Zero light = black, and maximum light = white. Every other colour is inbetween. The amount of light emitted to make a certain colour can be described in a number of different ways (percentages, fractional values etc), but the most common is integers (remember them from high school?) between 0 and 255.
Where do you use it?
When talking about colours used in an electronic/digital environment.
If you’re just dealing with the web and documents made to view online, colours are generally specified as RGB values. However, just to confuse things, most laser and inkjet printers that you might use at home will print RGB images.
The downside
You can’t print professionally if your document is in RGB colour mode. Microsoft Office products specify colour as RGB because they are not design programs in which to build things that will be professionally printed using CMYK/Pantone colours.
Remember when computers monitors only showed green text on a black screen? As technology developed, more colours were able to be shown on screen, and somewhere along the line, “they” decided that there were 256 colours that every computer monitor could accurately detect. For ages, web designers were told to use only those 256 ‘web-safe colours’ in their designs. However techonology is advancing so fast that this rule is not really something to be concerned about too much any more.
Web colours do however have special codes made up of a hashtag followed by 6 letters and numbers. Those in the elite ‘256’ are made of a combination of 99, 66, 33, 00 and cc.
Other colours include the letters a-f and numbers 1-9.
When talking about colours used in an electronic/digital environment, but it’s mostly used to reference for solid colours on screen, like the background grey of this website (#d2d1d2).
The upside & downside
Similar to RGB, you wouldn’t specify a web colour to a printer.
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