Colors: CMYK vs. RGB vs. Pantone

In an ideal world, red would be red, blue would be blue, and green would be green. Often, when we’re designing, the ask is “make it blue and yellow”; which seems simple enough, but the truth is there are thousands of options of blue or yellow. I’m not just talking light blue vs. dark blue, I’m talking CMYK, RGB, and Pantone values and the seemingly unending options they each hold.

It’s important to understand the difference between these color modes and when to use each.

CMYK

CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key. In layman's terms, you can think of this as blue, red, yellow, and black. The CMYK color model is also called “process color” or “four color”, and it is a subtractive color model, which means as the colors overlap, the light wavelengths are absorbed and what you see is the visible spectrum of wavelengths that weren’t absorbed.

If you don’t care to know the science, just know CMYK uses a mixture of Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow to create a whole range of colors. Within CMYK you can adjust the levels of each color by percentages to produce different colors.