Design Nomenclature / Color
Spot color
Also called spot ink, Pantone, PMS color, spot colour
This entry has not been translated yet and is shown in English.
An ink mixed to a specification and printed from its own plate rather than simulated out of process screens. Spot buys colors process cannot reach — metallics, fluorescents, a clean deep blue — and absolute consistency across a run, at the price of one more plate for each one.
In practice
'Pantone' gets used as a synonym; it is one vendor's matching system among several. Specifying a spot color for something that will only ever be a screen is a category error people still make.
Not to be confused with
- CMYKThe subtractive process set: cyan, magenta, yellow, and a key black. Black is there because real inks are impure and CMY overprint gives a muddy brown, and because laying three wet inks where one would do is slow to dry, expensive, and blurs anything as fine as text.
- DuotoneA monochrome image rendered with two inks mapped to different stretches of the tonal range — typically a black holding the shadows and a second color carrying the midtones. The point is tonal range, not tinting: two plates preserve detail in the darks that a single flat ink flattens into mud.