Spot color

In printing a spot color is a color that is printed with its own ink. It is not printed using the process colors cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Spot color printing can be cheaper than full color printing, even though the price difference has decreased in recent years. It may be economically viable for one to three different colors, but it quickly becomes expensive for more colors.

There are a number of color specification systems for specifying spot colors. Pantone is the most widely used but in Germany and Switzerland HKS is pretty popular.

Translation from English

  • to Dutch (Nederlands): steunkleur
  • to French (Français): couleur d’accompagnement (f), couleur d’appoint (f)
  • to German (Deutsch): die Schmuckfarbe

Other terms in the printing dictionary

Click a letter to see other words in this design, prepress and print glossary.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0-9.