Colours & special colours

To ensure that all goes smoothly with the printing of your packaging and that your design looks exactly as you imagined it, please read our guidelines for handling colours and special colours.

CMYK is the abbreviation for the colours CYAN (blue), Magenta (red), Yellow (yellow) and Key (black). Since your packaging is to be printed, the CMYK colour mode is the right one.

Make sure that the document and all colours in it are set up in CMYK colour mode. In Illustrator and InDesign, you can check this in the top navigation under File > Document Colour Mode > CMYK Colour.

If you are using Pantone special colours for the design, these must be converted to CMYK colour mode.

A spot colour is a printing colour that is used in addition to the base colours. The term includes both custom colours for additional colour depth and special effect colours.

If you notice that one of your colours is not set up in CMYK mode and is therefore a custom colour, you have to change the corresponding colour setting in the colour type to the setting process colour and the colour mode to CMYK.

Ink coverage refers to the amount of ink applied to certain parts of a printed product.

If the ink coverage is too high, your print quality may be affected and images may become blurred.

Therefore, please ensure that you do not exceed the maximum ink coverage.

The limit for ink coverage is 380%, including the bila-white layer. This is 100%.

If the ink coverage in your print file is less than 280%, 100% bilawhite will be added. This will cause the total coverage to be less than 380%.

The ink coverage can be checked using tools such as Adobe Acrobat under All Tools > Use Print Production > Output Preview.

In Photoshop and Illustrator, you can reduce the ink coverage using the sliders for the respective colours.

Do you want to use black colour in your packaging design? For packaging printing, we recommend using 100% (K) black - ‘deep black’ - for black colour.