Common Color Errors in CMYK Printing of Business Cards

Printing business cards in full color can lead to some special problems when your have four (or now even six) print rollers which have to align perfectly, there can be some minor slippage and/or misalignment of the printing plates and this can cause problems.

When designing logos and business cards, the artist will very often create both the logo and the card in what is known as the Pantone matching color system. This system is one of pre-mixed inks which stand on their own. They are not created by mixing colors such as cyan, magenta, yellow and black. There can be much wider spectrum of colors available when using Pantone colors...especially rich blues, greens, purples, pastels and metallics. It is impossible to simulate these hues using the CMYK color system. In some instance, the print shop will want to print the business cards in the process/cymk color model even though the Pantone model was used. With graphics applications such as Adobe Illustrator, InDesign or CorelDraw, this can be done in one or two steps. Yet, a problem can develop. The Pantone to CMYK conversion can lead to some unusual CMYK color percentages. In CYMK, black should be at 100% of black, as is noted in the graphic below.

color issues with printing of business cards

Yet, the graphic below shows what can happen...We're still get the color black at 100%, but we're also getting cyan, magenta and yellow coming in at various percentages. If one were to look at the text, it still looks totally black and you couldn't tell about the other colors coming in until you used the color palette in Adobe Illustrator to see the percentages. In this case,there is absolutely no reason for cyan to be printing at 2%, even if we've already paid for full color printing for the business cards.

resolving color misalignment in printing of business cards

This graphics shows the potential effect of the unnecessary color due to misalignment..Notice the faint cyan drop-shadow effect? When proofing the full color business card it's important for the designer to manually check each graphic and check for stray cmyk colors to avoid such problems.

example of misalignment of printing plates in text