Spot Colours
Due to costs, spot colours are the preferred method of producing stationery inexpensively. The standard reference guide to spot colours is usually Pantone®.

Basically, an ink colour is ready-mixed to produce a particular colour, as in Pantone® 032 below.

Pantone 032 displayed at 100%

So if you were producing a 2 colour card with, for instance, Black as the main colour for text, then a 2nd Pantone® colour would be chosen from a colour swatch.

To produce this job would entail making 2 sheets of film which would then be used to make 2 printing plates for the press.

The more spot colours used, the more film and plates are needed, hence the increased costs.

To keep costs down it's possible to create tints of a spot colour without needing extra film or plates. The example (shown on the left) consists of Pantone® 032 at: 100% + 50% + 25%. These 3 'shades' would all be on 1 piece of film & 1 plate.

So, just for example, say we have a 2 colour leaflet to produce. Using the 2 colours plus variations in tint strength we can still end up with a very colourful job, without having to go the 4 colour route, which could prove to be rather expensive.

Process Colours (4 colour process, or CMYK)
Process colours are normally used where continuous tones (as in photographs) are required. The primary colours Cyan, Magenta & Yellow are mixed with Black to produce the full range of colours.

For instance, if we needed to produce the Pantone 032 colour above using a 4 colour process, the 'split' would be:

Cyan = 0%
Magenta = 90%
Yellow = 86%
Black = 0%.

As a separate piece of film and plate is produced for each of the 4 colours this adds heavily to the cost compared to printing in spot colours.

Some spot colours lend themselves perfectly to being reproduced using the 4 colour process, whereas others can cause slight problems in that the match is not perfect.

This is a very general outline of the 2 processes - there is quite a bit more involved with the various methods.

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Problems producing stationery using both spot & process colours
A more in-depth article relating to colour issues can be found << HERE >>

Let's say your company design uses 2 colours: Pantone 021 (Orange) and Black.

Let's also assume you require Letterheads & Business Cards.

Letterheads: the 2 colours would be set up on the press and if the orange (021) was later compared to a Pantone swatch then you would see that the match is very, very close. So far, so good.

Business Cards: you've decided, for whatever reason, to use a solid colour on the front or reverse of the card and you also want this matt-laminated. Due to cost, most commercial printers (ourselves included) would produce these cards using a 4 colour process (CMYK). The reason for this is that it is too expensive to set up a printing press with 2 spot colours and then laminate these cards. It is far more cost-effective to 'plan' multiple cards together, run on one large sheet, and then laminate the whole lot as one group. As all the cards will probably have different colours the way around this is to produce them from the 4 CMYK colours, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black.

However, the downside to this is that when certain spot colours are converted to CMYK there can be a distinct colour difference. I won't go into the technical reasons for what causes this, but it definitely can cause problems.

What this means is that the colour of your cards can end up being totally different from the colours on your letterheads. Note: this is not all colours, but just some that seem to cause this issue.

Workaround?
One workaround is to print the cards first, and then 'match' the letterheads to this colour. (Spot colours can easily be 'adjusted'). The problem then is that you end up with matching stationery, but all of a sudden it's not Pantone Orange (021) anymore, as we've matched to a CMYK colour.

If your shade of colour is critical then, unless you've had previous cards that are acceptable, it's probably best to steer away from cards produced using CMYK. However, not to alarm you overly, this problem only applies to certain spot colours.

We have a list of certain colours that cause problems and we would notify you during the artwork process if this was applicable.

To recap: if you want your card matt-laminated and also for the card to match existing stationery, then it would definitely be worth checking with us first to see if there may be any colour-matching issues.

If you are at all concerned about achieving colour consistency across all your printed products, whether stationery or promotional items please read a fuller explanation of the above issues, posted < HERE >

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