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Attracting Readers with Color
Posted by Karl | Posted in Graphics | Posted on 18-01-2012
Color is basic and yet so powerful in its effect on our senses while providing deep rooted emotional responses; this makes your use of color absolutely vital when it comes to presenting your ideas to the world.
A simple absence of color can convey a lack of emotion, a professional aura, prudent and sober decision making.
A presence of color can convey bright ideas, shock and taste, happy go lucky approach, friendly and easy to deal with attitude and much more.
The use of color or its absence is intrinsic to the success of your brochure, newsletter, direct mailing or sales flyer and cannot be ignored so let’s look at teh basics with color without blowing your budget in the process.
There are two ways color is used: spot color printing and four-color process.
The Four Color-Process uses a combination of four colors to produce the actual colors you will see on your finished product.
Spot Color Printing uses different color inks applied as required to produce the finished product.
You will need to be familiar with terms such as grayscales, screens and halftones along with CMYK, RGB and PS to understand how color is working with your printing projects.
CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black – this refers to the four inks used in the 4-color process and from these colors are produced the rest as required.
RGB stands for Red, Green, Blue and is used on monitors (computer screens) and televisions to produce color – this is important to know as you will be scanning pictures in RGB (to produce the best monitor reproduction) but the actual finished product needs to be printed as CMYK files to ensure maximum quality in reproduction.
PMS stands for Pantone Matching System and is used in the spot color inking process with a computer design package having literally thousands of Pantone color schemes for you to use in creating your design and ultimately finished product. Use swatches when selecting colors because on the computer screen they will always appear brighter to your naked eye due to the back illumiination of the monitor screen but this will not be available in the finished product which will appear duller in comparison.
