Noor Haddad
Graphic Designer
Colours that survive the printer
Notes from a week of proofs, swatches and one very orange business card.
A colour can look perfect on screen and arrive from the printer as a sad, muddy cousin. Screens glow and paper absorbs, so the same values rarely behave the same way. Every brand palette we make now gets a print check early, before anyone falls in love with a shade that can’t survive real life.
Our routine is simple. We pick spot or CMYK matches for every key colour, print them on the stocks the client will actually use and look at them in daylight and office light. Sometimes we nudge a hue, sometimes we change the paper. The goal is a colour that feels the same on a phone, a poster and the side of a box.
