Printing is a complex part of the design process. All the labels that we design have to be tested to ensure that the design is not too saturated to be printed on the home printer. And with saying that, it is clear that home printing has advanced enormously from say 5-10 years ago. Home users now own inkjet printers that print great graphics. In addition many home users now own laser printers, which for the home user spells the epitome of what printing can be.

Apart from the actual printing there are other aspects of printing that need to be understood - such as printing out put format. Graphics can either be CMYK or RGB graphics. Typically, labels for professional printing is in CMYK mode. The acronym stands for c (cyan), m (magenta) y(yellow) k (black) - so a label designed in this color mode would have varying percentages of each color. The other format used is RGB mode. RGB stands for red, green and blue.

To print each design, we test how the printing results are from various types of papers and we test different color backgrounds to see how a color label prints - say a beige background versus a standard white background.

Here are some results:

• Yellow becomes darker/more saturated on a beige/cream background
• green has more yellow tones on a beige background (and less blue). This is important because a green with more blue is a cooler green than a green with more yellow - which is a warmer green. e.g of cooler greens are jade green, emerald green - e.g of warmer greens are - lime green, chartreuse
• red may become a orange/red  tomato red on a beige background
• purple has more mauve/greyish tones of beige on beige/cream
• pink becomes a peachy pink on a beige/cream background
• Light blue may become more emerald/jade like on a beige/cream background
• So as not to have all of the above issues - print color labels on a white background!
• But for those times when you want to vary the design colors without changing the actual graphics, then experimenting with different color papers is great.