Spot Colours & Effects

Spot colours refer to any ink that is outside the standard CMYK spectrum. That means that artwork has a Pantone or effect colour assigned within it for a specific purpose. Think of it as though these are colours/inks that you would not be able to print out of your home printer either reliably, or at all. That's when you require a spot colour.

UV cured Spot Gloss or Spot Matt effects are the most straight forward to understand as they are both clear in colour, but change the sheen of a specific area in the artwork.  So our cardstock has it's CMYK art printed and then a separate process prints the UV cured Gloss or Matt ink. As well as such effects being applied to our printed parts, we can also print these effects onto a disk itself, evident in our Vinyl Imitation Package.

Other spot colours are utilised when a specific colour is required. These are specifically mixed inks or varnishes used in a dedicated machine or machine channel. Colours are usually referenced by using the Pantone matching system. Our on-body disc printing regularly replicates the colour references onto Screen Printed discs, but the process can be implemented on the packaging sleeves through Lithographic or Screen Printing. These processes are great for metallic or neon effects and there are literally thousands of colours to choose from.

We only advise specific matching for larger runs as smaller runs can prove expensive per unit, but if you were aiming to replicate Neon or Metallic inks then spot colours are the road to take. For colours that could be made from a CMYK formula, we can convert spot colours into CMYK, or colour match to an existing physical product, but please talk to us about this process as there are limits and caveats, depending on what you are trying to achieve.

If you are unfamiliar with how these spot colours work, or are looking for pricing on a spot colour run, then please reach out to us. The exact type of ink and the area of coverage can play a big part in how we approach the process, so if you have artwork, even if it is preliminary, it would be worth having that to hand at the point of application.