Understanding Color: why your monitor is a liar

This quick tutorial is just the tip of the iceberg in regards to the wonderful world of color. But it should give you a good idea of a graphic designer and client’s standpoint. There is a lot of back and forth between a client and their graphic designer during the design process. Sketches and proofs seem to fly between hands…or monitors, I should say. And this is where many problems and disagreements can arise between the two parties. Ninety-nine percent of professional graphic designers use special monitors as a hosting palette for their design work. And hopefully all of them have calibrated their monitor at least every six months. Calibrating a monitor isn’t too difficult—most computers have built-in software to guide the user through about a dozen steps. A correctly calibrated monitor should accurately reflect the chosen color or colors in a project. And in an ideal graphic designer’s world, every monitor across the universe would be correctly calibrated and henceforth there would be little or no discretion about color…ever again. BUT, that will never happen because not everyone cares enough. Most clients use a home or small office monitor to look at their pdf and jpeg proofs and nearly none of them will have a calibrated monitor. That’s okay; graphic designers really don’t expect a client to take the time or effort to do so. As a result, a graphic designer will usually get an e-mail or phone call from the client explaining why they don’t like the color used in the project or will try to describe a new, better color for he/she to use. And the graphic designer will tell the client that what they see on their monitor is a poor representation of the actual color. See, in the design world we have this great big awesome system called the Pantone Matching System (PMS for short). It’s wonderful. The actual swatch book looks a lot like a Benjamin Moore paint book swatch and it works just about the same way as mixing a can of Ben Moore to get the perfect egg shell white. The PMS system is only used for printed material, but it is a worldwide system that guarantees you get the same color every time no matter where you get the piece printed. A graphic designer should have a PMS book to show a client the colors he/she chooses for their piece, and the client can also choose any color from the book as well. A client shouldn’t judge the final color of their piece until they see the PMS booklet and the designer should always remind the client of that. A client should be able to choose his/her dream color from a PMS book because there are about 20 or so books to choose from.

The PMS world is vast and very fun to work with. But there are two other common color worlds that graphic designers use: CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) and RGB (red, green, blue). CMYK is also used for printed pieces but works a little differently from PMS. It’s usually used for full color printing, such as pieces using color photographs, and can be cheaper to print if you run a piece digitally (that’s a whole different tutorial that I won’t get into now). One can nearly make an infinite amount of colors using the CMYK color mode, which is why a lot of printers use this color mode. RGB on the other hand, is a color mode used for film, photography and the Internet because it uses light. In fact, everyone’s monitor uses the RGB color mode to display colors because it is reflecting light to the user’s eye. A TV’s picture is made up of red, green and blue pixels; and using a combination of those three colors is what produces the picture that you see. Same idea with the film used in movies and your non-digital camera. A digital camera translates an image using the RGB mode, too.

In any case, a graphic designer should be able to explain this process to a client and ensure him/her that what they see on their monitor is a big fat lie. A client should be able trust their graphic designer with color, as it can be an intimidating world for the average person.