Standard Ink Colours

When a colour is critical, the best way to communicate it is with the Pantone Colour Books. The books allow you to be confident that the swatch you’re looking at in your book is the same as the swatch in your printers’ book.

Pantone colours can be simulated on a computer or mobile device, but for true communication accuracy the best bet is to choose from a physical Pantone Book.

Here are some suggestions if you don’t own a Pantone Book:

• Contact a local design studio and ask if you can visit to choose a colour.
• Visit your nearest print shop (including ours) and ask if you can have a look through their book to choose a colour.
• Ask any designer or artist in your social network if they may have access to a Book.

Our eyes can see a wide variety of colours, but not all of those colours can be printed. There are many compromises happening with colour when our eyes are viewing colours represented on an RGB display like our phones, or a CMYK printout on a billboard, or a swatch in a Pantone Colour Guide, or a spot-colour Screen Printed on a t-shirt.

Use our Colour Gamut Comparison to get an idea of the range of colours that can be seen by our eyes, versus displayed on a screen, mixed with the Pantone System, or with CMYK inks.

Inks can be mixed to closely simulate swatches from the Pantone Matching System. We keep a copy of both the Solid Coated and Solid Uncoated guides in our studio for different types of ink.

Once printed, the main type of inks we use are similar swatches from the Solid Coated book. The inks are slightly glossy and reflect a bit of light, so it’s not possible to simulate Solid Uncoated swatches with our current ink process.

Both the Solid Coated and Solid Uncoated books contain inks printed onto paper. Screen printed inks applied to textiles behave a little bit differently due to difference in the ink and the texture of the garment, so it’s important to note that it’s not possible to perfectly match a Pantone Swatch, only to closely simulate it with the different ink type. There are optical differences due to the variables between ink and garment.

Talk to a Printing Pro for more details when exact colour accuracy is a concern!

All of them! We also offer 40+ Stock Ink Colours to narrow it down a bit.

We can also mix a custom Pantone colour for $35 per custom colour, per order.