Colour Techniques

OK I'm back at my parents for the weekend and with it being cold outside and me still recovering from a (freshers) cold that seems to have gone on for weeks I thought it would be a good time to do some blogging.

I've been trying to find some good examples of different print techniques from around the house which has yielded some pretty unusual results. None of them are particularly interesting in terms of design, but it was interesting going around the house trying to work out how a whole lot of different things had been printed.

CMYK - I've noticed a lot of flyers around Leeds that use pure Cyan, Magenta and Yellow as there main colour pallet a bit like the one above. I'm guessing they do this because using pure Cyan or Magenta etc. will give them pretty much the most vibrant colours available using this printing process because it is a subtractive colour model, and maybe because it is trendy at the moment.

DUOTONE - I found a couple examples of what I'm pretty sure are duotone prints around the house. I imagine both are from pretty small print runs and they chose to print them in duotone to save money rather than for any aesthetic reason.





GREYSCALE - The Guardian is usually printed in full colour. But for this edition of G2, from yesterday, which focuses on the current economic crisis they decided to print it in greyscale to represent and evoke the gloomy mood of the economy and recession. I think this is a brilliant idea from the guardian which is consistently well designed, especially in comparison to other daily newspapers.





SPOT COLOUR - I came across a couple of examples of spot colour around the house the first one is the Graphic cover that everyone will probably have seen, which is printed with a spot neon pink and another special glow in the dark ink only printed on the 'ink' of the 'pink'. The other example is a book of my dads which is printed in black and red (i don't know weather this is a CMYK red or a spot red) and a spot metallic silver which definitely couldn't be achieved through the CMYK process.

Thats all for now I will try and find some examples of RGB and monotone soon.