Making your business cards and your website look like one brand

Why the colours never match

Your screen makes colour by mixing light, using red, green and blue. A printer makes colour by laying down ink, using cyan, magenta, yellow and black. They are physically different processes, and some screen colours simply cannot be reproduced in ink.

Bright blues and vivid greens are the usual casualties. A colour that glows on a monitor can come back from the printer looking flat and slightly grey, and nothing has gone wrong.

The practical fix is to decide the printed colour first, because it is the more constrained medium, then set the screen version to match it as closely as possible. If you print frequently, pick a Pantone reference and give the same code to every supplier.

Fonts that survive the trip

• Check the licence. Many free web fonts allow screen use but restrict commercial print or embedding. Google Fonts are generally safe for both.
• Outline your type in print artwork. Converting text to outlines means the printer does not need your font installed, which removes the most common substitution disaster.
• Keep the family small. One display face and one text face, used consistently, reads as deliberate. Four faces reads as an accident.
• Mind the weights. Very light weights that look elegant on screen can break up when printed small on uncoated stock.

Supplying print files correctly

1. Send vector PDFsPrint-ready PDF or the original vector file. Never a JPG downloaded from your website, which is low resolution and in the wrong colour space.
2. Include bleedUsually 3mm beyond the trim on every edge, so trimming does not leave a white sliver.
3. Respect the safety marginKeep text at least 3 to 5mm inside the trim line. Cutting is accurate but not perfect.
4. Use 300dpi imagesAnything lower prints soft, and there is no way to add detail back afterwards.
5. Convert to CMYK before sendingIf you let the printer convert, you find out what happened after it is printed.

The brand sheet that ends the problem

One page, kept wherever your team can find it, containing:

• Logo files: vector, transparent PNG, one-colour versions.
• Colours in HEX, CMYK and Pantone.
• Font names, weights and where to license them.
• Minimum logo size and the clear space around it.
• What not to do: no stretching, no recolouring, no adding effects.

Hand that to a printer, a sign writer or a new employee and everything they produce will match. Without it, every supplier makes their own reasonable guess, and the brand drifts a little further each time.