Metallic colors are always tricky, particularly when you move from spot to process color – after all, the actual metallic look in, say, metallic gold ink comes from actual metal particles suspended in the ink. With process printing you lose the little sparkly bits that make something look metallic.

So – this morning I was working on setting up some business cards that were previously done on an offset press but will now be done digitally in four-color process, for cost effectiveness. The cards previously used metallic gold ink, so the trick was to find a suitable CMYK equivalent for metallic gold.

Thankfully, this discussion thread came in handy – turns out the proper CMYK mix is C:35 M:45 Y:100 K: 0. I printed out a sample and by golly, it looks convincing.

Tags: business cards, color theory, printing

This entry was posted by Next Day Sign on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 8:46 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.