Have you ever wondered how brands with recognizable, vibrant branding like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, FedEx and Hello Fresh, to name a few, keep a consistent look across their packaging and print mediums? There’s more to it than meets the eye.
Colour consistency is important in terms of building brand recognition, and the psychology of colour is another crucial consideration to make (but that’s a discussion for another blog post!) With this in mind, your business’ graphic designer or printer will encourage you to make an important choice: Pantone, or CMYK.
What’s the difference, you ask? When it all boils down to it, the main difference between Pantone and CMYK printing is the level of precision.
Pantone
Using a similar technique used by household paint manufacturers, the Pantone system assigns ink colours to a corresponding number and swatch sample. Because of this, printers and designers can refer to the Pantone system to ensure colours match every single time, no matter the project.
With over 1,800 shades, Pantone offers a ton of hues that CMYK can’t replicate, but at a higher printing cost. Pantone is usually reserved for higher volume printing, typically on flexo presses or offset printing presses.
In the Pantone swatch book, every colour has a CMYK equivalent next to it. So for example, if you see a beautiful shade of green in the Pantone swatch book that you’d really love to use, you can use the CMYK equivalent to find the closest colour match.
CMYK
CMYK is the most popular method of printing and is used in magazines, newspapers, commercial printers and photo printers. But before we get into it, what does CMYK even stand for?
C – Cyan (a light shade of blue)
M- Magenta (a pink-ish red shade)
Y- Yellow
K – Key plate, aka Black
CMYK colours are created by applying a combination of these four colours together in microscopic dots. These ink dots are applied at different angles and in varying quantities, with the amount of ink used expressed as ‘dots-per-inch’ (DPI).
In CMYK printing, the Cyan, Magenta and Yellow inks reflect their complementary colours on the colour wheel. Cyan reflects red, Magenta reflects green, and Yellow reflects blue. The colours you see are just combinations of these reflected colours. Since only four colours are used in CMYK, it can’t replicate all Pantone shades perfectly, but it can come pretty close!
At Take Root Creative, we work on a variety of projects that use both CMYK and Pantone colours! If you’re not sure which colour method works best for your project, we’re happy to help.
Sources:
https://creativemarket.com/blog/whats-the-difference-between-pantone-cmyk-and-rgb-colors
https://marchbranding.com/buzz/cmyk-vs-pantone-which-colour-space-to-use/
https://www.pantone.com/articles/technical/pantone-numbering-explained
https://www.enkoproducts.com/articles/cmyk-vs-pantone-colors-which-system-is-better-for-printing/