RGB, CMYK... What do you actually do with it?

Let's take a look at the basics. Colour is a powerful means of communication. Of course, it is recognisable, just think of the green of Starbucks or the red of Coca-Cola. But color also evokes emotions. Although the latter may vary from one culture to another. For example, red is of course the color of love, but it is also associated with aggression. And for us, black is often the color of mourning, while in other countries this is true for white. Color does something to you. Once you have chosen a color, you naturally want to use it consistently in all your communications. Offline as well as online. And that is exactly the crux...

A world of difference

In the world of communication, the most important dichotomy is: offline and online. Offline is everything that is produced for off-screen use. Think of brochures, advertisements, display materials, give-aways, etc. The printed matter for this purpose is produced with printing presses or printers. Online is everything that is shown on screens. Think of your computer and your phone, but also the digital displays along the highway. There is no ink involved, the color appears electronically.
In printing and screens, colors are mixed in completely different ways. To print, mix printing inks or toners, while screens mix different colors of light. The methods provide enormous differences in color and color experience.

Offline colors

To make things a little easier, we in the Netherlands use roughly two standards for the use of color in the printing of offline resources.

1. Full color colors: CMYK
2. Full color basically uses cyan (C - bright blue), magenta (M - hot pink) and yellow (Y - yellow). By mixing these basic colors in different proportions, you can make many other colors, but never black, at most dark brown. That is why black is also added as an extra key color (K — “key”). Full color is therefore also called CMYK after the initial letters. Because each of these colors can occur in percentages between 0 and 100%, this means that, in theory, at least 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 = 100,000,000 separate shades of color are possible with this system!
3. A CMYK color is displayed using a range of four percentages between 0 and 100. For example, C5-M67-Y100-K0, means a blend of 5% cyan + 67% magenta + 100% yellow + 0% black. In this case, the result is an orange color.
4. Pantone colors: PMS
5. In addition to CMYK, there is another standard for defining (printing) colors: the so-called PMS colors. PMS stands for “Pantone Matching System”, after the company of the same name that markets these colors. The basis is a limited number of printing inks in different colors, which are mixed into new colors according to fixed proportions. These “recipes” for a color are standardized worldwide. The advantage; the colors of your print are exactly the same in China, for example, as here in the Netherlands. More than 1,100 individual PMS colors have now been defined, each with its own color number and mixing recipe. For example, Pantone (PMS) 320 is a turquoise color.

From PMS to CMYK

Within a corporate identity, PMS colors are often prescribed, which also have a translation into full-color colors. Unfortunately, not all colors can be translated 1-on-1 from one color system to another. In the CMYK system, certain bright colors (e.g. bright orange) cannot be achieved that can be achieved with the PMS system. With CMYK, colors are often a bit matte. Most software packages do have the option to translate colors from PMS to CMYK (usually not the other way around!) , but there is little system to discover. Each program has its own translation modules. Even programs within one package (e.g. InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator from the widely used Adobe Creative Cloud) can deal with converting colors differently! Although there are many websites that provide advice on color conversion between different color systems, they also use their own - read different - values. So there is no real, absolute standard. That is why it is good not to just rely on the specified conversion of a system, and to be critical yourself and also see what you think is best suited.

Tip: Maybe we recommend the website of Pantone to use as a standard yourself. Here are recommendations for converting PMS colors to CMYK — as well as RGB and hexadecimal colors (more about that below) — although their values also differ from those in most software packages.
[Update: The site was previously free for color conversions, but unfortunately now you have to pay for it!]

Colours Online

So much for the color schemes for printing, in other words the offline tools. Time to dive into the world of online color use. Here, too, two color systems are globally used:

1. RGB colors
2. RGB stands for red, green, and blue. These are the three colors of light that monitors work with; together, they provide white light. Each color can have 256 values (0 to 255). With it, you can also make an awful lot of different colors. A quick math: 256 x 256 x 256 = more than 16.7 million colors that can be mixed! And an additional advantage of RGB is that, precisely because it is based on light, it creates bright, powerful colors that cannot be achieved with CMYK or PMS. An RGB color is displayed using a 3-digit range between values 0 and 255. For example, R230-G0-B126 means 230 red + 0 green + 126 blue. This gives the pink color that we use for our corporate identity.
3. Hex colors
4. Hex colors, short for “hexadecimal colors”, are in fact the same as RGB colors, but the notation method differs. HEX is specially used to record the RGB values in the code language of websites and apps, among other things. These are codes that work with a six-digit system — “hexa” is six in Greek — that consist of combinations of numbers 0 to 9 and/or letters from a to f, preceded by the number sign: # (“hashtag”). The above mentioned RGB color R230-G0-B126 is translated into a hexadecimal code like: #e6007e. If you cut the code into three parts of two numbers/letters: e6, 00 and 7e, each of these three parts is a different notation of 230, 00 and 126, respectively, according to a certain mathematical system; we won't bother you with that any further. Both notations represent exactly the same values of red, green, and blue.

There will be a difference!

Well... there must be a difference, they sometimes say, but there will also be a difference! Because the color systems mentioned from offline and online resources are so different, work with different principles and because good standards for the mutual conversion of colors are currently lacking, a certain (corporate identity) color will never work out exactly the same in your offline and online expressions. Add to that that the background color, material and setting of your monitor or printer also have a huge influence on the color (experience) and you understand: a 100% match in all areas is actually impossible.

Of course, we also do our utmost to determine the color definitions within your corporate identity in such a way that they are as close as possible for PMS, CMYK, and RGB/HEX. But one color is simply not the other. That is something we have to learn to live with in a communications country.

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