CMYK and RGB refer to the two main 'colour spaces'. RGB represents Red, Green and Blue, the three colours used to make up light, such as on your TV screen or computer monitor. CMYK on the other hand stands for Cyan, Yellow, Magenta and Black, and these are the colours used to make up full colour print. Incidentally, the K is used for black as B has already been used for blue. All this is confusing enough already without the same letter representing two different colours!

Why are different colours used for light and for print? Well, in simple terms, when using RGB the zero setting (i.e., if there is zero red, zero green and zero blue) gives you black. The more of each colour you add, the closer you get to white. With CMYK, you start with white (as in a blank piece of paper), and the more colours you add the closer you get to black.

Quite annoyingly, the colours that RGB can create with are different to the colours CMYK can produce. Therefore, it’s always better to design in CMYK if you can. If you design in CMYK, the printed version of your design will look much closer to your screen version than if you design in RGB. We can print from RGB files, but we wouldn’t want you to be disappointed with the colours when it’s printed and they don’t look how you expected them to. This diagram gives a rough idea of the different colours that can be represented.

One of our most common colour problems is when standard blue is used in Microsoft Word. The bright blue you see on screen cannot be printed using CMYK and will come out darker.

Make sense? So far, we’ve got the format, the picture resolution and the colours. On to a winner right here. Let’s break it up with a quick tip…

Design Top Tip: Page Size. We don’t want to pick on Microsoft here, but about 50% of all Word documents we receive to print have been created with the page size set as the American Letter paper rather than A4. Please check you have all your page settings correct.

OK. Laying up pictures next.

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