Spot Colour

Spot Colour

-Special Colour, Tint

In general spot colours are used to highlight certain parts of a print, whether it be a logo, a headline or decorative design as they tend to stand/pop out and are Mostly used in Offset litho printing. In contrast to 4-print process(CMYK) spot colours are custom pre-mixed inks, they are opaque and therefore do not overprint well. Overprinting being clear in the name, when you print over existing ink.

         Spot colours are specified by colour matching systems, the most commonly used of them being the Pantone Matching System(PMS). It is down to systems like this how spot colours have become classified, for example, within the PMS, Spot Colours are each given a name or code, E.G. Pantone 2905C. This system can be used in several ways, firstly there are swatch books which give an example of the colours with its code. They can also be used within Adobe programs, with Illustrator, to access spot colours simply bring out the Swatch tab, click on the scroll down menu, select swatch library then select colour books and there you shall find a list of different Pantone books. When on photoshop to access the Pantone booklets, go onto colour picker and select colour library and then again is the list of booklets! 

The method of printing with Spot colours can be both expensive and cheap! If the product goes to print which has been made to use the 4-print process plus one or more spot colours the price if obviously going to increase. However it is possible to print products with just one or two spot colours therefore making it generally cheaper than using 4-process printing. 

What is quite interesting about spot colours is that they are used for printing security based products such as passports and money, the reason being is that the colours are hard to replicate and forge.