When you design a brochure or other marketing piece with color printing in mind,
you usually don’t think much about the background of the paper, right? You’ve probably assumed you’ll be using white or an off-white color to best show your colors. When you print on white paper, you know what you’re going to get. But white paper stock is not always the best choice.
White paper with some spot colors of ink has been done again and again. If you want to make your next marketing piece really stand out, consider using color printing on colored paper. What can be an okay-looking flyer or poster can really pop if you use colored paper.
To help you make the leap into using colored paper to jazz up your marketing materials, here are some considerations to think about.
CMYK inks are transparent
You can’t really tell on white paper, but the inks used in the four-color printing process (the most commonly used printing process) are transparent. This means that images printed on a cream-colored paper will seem warmer because of the yellow showing through from the tint of the paper. This means if you’re printing photos of people with lots of skin showing, you might want to tone down some of the yellow ink so that people don’t look like they have jaundice!
And, the darker the paper, the more the color will affect the color in your images. You also need to watch for dot gain, which is the ink seeping into the paper fibers and spreading through the fibers.
So far, printing on colored paper doesn’t sound so good, eh? It’s worth it though, when you are finished and you have a great looking, eye-catching marketing piece. And you can get that great-looking piece by doing one of the following:
Ask your printer for samples of the inks you’ve chosen on the colored paper stock. This will show you how solid coverage looks on the paper. You can look for dot gain and see how well you like the color contrast between the ink and the paper.
Ask your printer for a press proof. This is more expensive than just seeing the samples of ink on paper, because you’re asking the printer to actually use your files to print a small run of your item. Then you could make color adjustments in your files based on what you see in the proof.
Find a digital printer and request a few sheets be digitally printed on your choice of paper. It won’t look exactly the same as when you get it printed for real, because toner will most likely be used instead of ink, but it will be pretty close. This will probably cost you between $50 and $100 for multiple pages of your project. (You can just print all the pages with photos to make sure that those come out perfect.)
Color printing on colored paper can really catch people’s attention, if you do it right. And doing it right isn’t that hard – you just need to do some spot checking up front. The payoffs of adding another step at the beginning will be well worth it!
