A pop of colour is sometimes all that’s needed to make printed materials stand out and make a lasting impression. Whether it’s for a school or uni presentation, handing out brochures or pamphlets for your business, or just about any other application, a little (or a lot of) colour can make you stand out from the competition and engage readers with your material.
Printing in colour is quite obviously not the same as printing in black and white. Each has its uses, but printing in colour is a little more complex and what you see on your computer monitor doesn’t always give you a good impression of what something will look like once the inkjet printers start rolling off your material.
Here are a few tips for printing beautiful colour materials:
Choosing the right colour(s) for your needs may be a simple matter, e.g. choosing already established corporate branded colour palettes. Quite often, however, you’ll need to give careful consideration to which main colour(s) you’ll be using, as well as which colours complement/contrast with those colours.
Fortunately, there are plenty of online resources used by graphic designers and product designers that can give you all of this information readily, as well as act as inspiration for your own designs. Free online resources like Color Hunt give you pretty much any colour combination you could want as well as all colours that complement and contrast with them.
Moreover, you’ll get Hex codes which can be important for establishing a fixed palette that matches your exact needs for future design projects. Hex codes are great to keep on hand internally, e.g. when making a website or social media posts that need to have the same palette as printed materials.
Hex codes can also be provided to a local print shop to help them understand exactly which colour(s) you need for a specific design.
It bears repeating that your finished product may not look exactly as you anticipated. The pixels on your screen, even if extremely vivid on a modern monitor, might not look or behave the same way in real life due to natural lighting and choice of card stock and/or finish, e.g. gloss.
For this reason, it’s always a good idea to do a trial print run of one or a handful of your materials and see it for yourself before dedicating a large-scale print run. A little extra caution can go a long way towards ensuring that your printed materials look exactly how you want them to.
One of the most important steps to printing beautiful colour materials is to choose a reliable local print shop like Print on Demand. Our shop will work with our valued clients – you – to ensure that you’re fully satisfied with the finished product.
To be frank, you can get by just fine printing black and white A4 paper on your home or office printer without too much worry about quality. When it comes to colour printing, however, you should want the best of the best and not an inconsistent inkjet printer that perhaps gets the colours a little off.
Print in living colour with Print on Demand.