Your logo looks wrong on the flyer because screens make colour with light (RGB) and printers make it with ink (CMYK), and some of the brightest screen colours can’t be printed with standard inks at all. The zingy lime green from your website comes out a bit olive. The bright blue is darker and flatter. Hold the flyer next to your laptop and it looks like a different brand.
Nobody’s made a mistake, necessarily. Once you understand the difference, it’s easy to avoid.
Light versus ink
RGB (red, green, blue) is how screens make colour. They start black and add light. Turn all three up to full and you get white. Because a screen is emitting light straight into your eyes, it can show very bright, saturated colours, especially greens, electric blues and fluoro oranges.
CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black, the “K”) is how most printing works. It starts with white paper and adds ink, which absorbs light. The more ink, the darker it gets. Paper can only reflect so much light back at you, so the range of colours CMYK can reproduce (the “gamut”) is smaller than a screen’s.
The colours that fall outside the CMYK range are exactly the ones small businesses tend to love: vivid lime, neon pink, bright turquoise, intense orange. When an RGB file goes to a CMYK press, the software has to squash those colours into the nearest printable match. That’s your olive green.
What Pantone adds
Pantone (the Pantone Matching System) is a third option. Instead of building a colour from four process inks, the printer mixes a specific ink to a numbered recipe, like Pantone 2728 C. It’s used when colour consistency really matters, or when the colour simply can’t be reached in CMYK.
Two things trip people up:
- The C and U suffixes matter. “C” means coated paper (smooth, often glossy or satin). “U” means uncoated (like letterhead or recycled stock). The same ink looks different on each, because uncoated paper absorbs more ink and softens the colour. A brand guide should list both if you print on both.
- Not every job uses Pantone inks. A run of 500 flyers from an online printer will almost certainly be printed in CMYK. Specifying a Pantone colour doesn’t make it happen. Your designer gives the printer a CMYK equivalent instead. Spot colour printing makes sense for things like large runs of letterhead, packaging, or signage vinyl matched to a swatch.
Pantone sells physical swatch books, and a printed swatch is the only reliable way to see what a colour will look like on paper. Your screen can’t show you, for the reasons above.
Which file goes where
This is the bit to keep. A proper logo pack should include versions for each colour mode, and you send different ones to different people.
| Who’s asking | What to send | Colour mode |
|---|---|---|
| Website developer | SVG, plus PNG with transparent background | RGB |
| Social media, email signature, Canva | PNG (transparent) or JPG | RGB |
| Printer (flyers, brochures, business cards) | PDF or EPS, vector | CMYK |
| Printer, for a spot colour job | PDF or EPS with Pantone colours defined | Pantone (spot) |
| Signwriter or vehicle wrap | PDF, EPS or AI, vector | CMYK and Pantone references, they’ll match vinyl to it |
| Embroidery or promo products | Vector PDF or EPS | Pantone references preferred |
If you only have a JPG of your logo that someone pulled off the website, you don’t have what a printer needs. Our guide to logo file formats explains what each format is for and what you should ask your designer for.
The fixes, in order
If you’re choosing brand colours
Check every colour in CMYK before you commit. A good designer does this as part of the logo process: they’ll pick an RGB, CMYK and Pantone version of each brand colour together, and show you a printed proof. If your favourite green can’t be printed, better to know now than after 5,000 business cards.
You can also deliberately keep a brighter RGB version for screens and a slightly different CMYK version for print. That’s normal. The goal is that they feel like the same colour side by side, not that they’re mathematically identical.
If you already have a colour that prints badly
Ask your designer to set a proper CMYK breakdown for it, rather than letting the printer’s software convert it automatically. Automatic conversion picks a mathematically “close” colour. A designer picks the one that looks right. Sometimes that means a slightly different hue to keep the colour feeling bright rather than going muddy.
For signage and wraps, give the signwriter a Pantone reference and ask them to match a vinyl to it. They’ll show you the options.
Before any print job
- Ask for a proof and look at it under daylight, not just on screen. For colour-critical jobs, ask for a hard-copy proof on the actual paper.
- Know your paper. The same file on uncoated recycled stock will look softer than on gloss. Neither is wrong, but you should expect it.
- Watch the blacks. Large areas of black printed with only black ink can look washed out and grey. Designers use a “rich black” (black plus some cyan, magenta and yellow) for big solid areas. Ask your printer for their preferred mix, because each press is different. For small text, plain black is better, as rich black can blur slightly.
- Don’t send RGB and hope. Many online printers will convert it for you without telling you, and you’ll get whatever their software decides.
The thing nobody tells you about screens
Even RGB isn’t consistent. Your phone, your laptop and the screen at the print shop all show colour differently, depending on brightness, settings and the panel itself. That’s why designers work to numbers (HEX and RGB values for web, CMYK percentages for print, Pantone references for matching) rather than “what it looks like on my screen”.
So when you’re comparing a print proof to your website, the question isn’t “is it identical to my monitor?” It’s “does it look like our brand, and does it match our last print run?”
Getting it right from the start
Most of the colour problems we fix come from a logo that was designed only for screen, then printed for the first time years later. If you’re about to do your first proper print job, whether that’s a flyer, signage or a brochure, it’s worth getting your colour specs sorted first. Our article on designing a flyer people actually read picks up from there.
Our roots are in print and publications, and our graphic design work runs from signage to annual reports, so colour across screen and paper is something we check on every branding and logo design job. If you can’t tell which of your logo files are RGB and which are CMYK, get in touch. We can sort them and fill the gaps before your next print job.