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  "description": "A Japanese colour book, a digital-first brand, and a late encounter with Pantone led me to finally understand why print colour always felt confusing.",
  "path": "/colour-systems-and-the-moment-it-clicked/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-01-02T10:09:39.000Z",
  "site": "https://hoeijmakers.net",
  "tags": [
    "The difference between slides and photos",
    "The miracle of your screen",
    "Blue LED changed the world"
  ],
  "textContent": "For most of my working life, colour was a digital thing.\n\nI designed on screens, judged on screens, published on screens. Print existed somewhere in the background, but it always felt slightly opaque. Colours came back different. Deeper on screen, flatter on paper. More constrained. More brittle.\n\nI accepted that as one of those things you “just had to know”, without ever really understanding why.\n\nThat changed recently, through a combination of a book, a branding question, and a slow realisation about how colour systems actually work.\n\n## A book I still love\n\nThe immediate trigger was _A Dictionary of Color Combinations_ , based on the colour studies of Japanese artist **Sanzo** **Wada** and later compiled by Seigensha, which I was given as a present.\n\nIt is a lovely object. Calm, precise, generous. It does not define colours in isolation, but shows how they behave together. Pairs, trios, quartets. Harmonies rather than absolutes.\n\nIt is inspiring in a very practical way. For clothing. For interiors. For branding. I still use it, and I still love it.\n\nWhat struck me, though, was a review that mentioned that the colours “used to be richer and deeper” and that newer editions felt flatter, more CMYK-like.\n\nAt the time, that comment lingered. Only later did it start to make sense.\n\nA dictionary of color combinations\n\n## Designing our own brand, digital first\n\nAround the same time, I was looking back at our own brand.\n\nWe designed it ourselves, deliberately. Two colours. A deep blue and a pinkish glow. They are not arbitrary. They are derived from Earth’s shadow: the darkening blue of the shadow itself, and the pink glow caused by atmospheric scattering at its edge.\n\nThose colours came from observation, not from a colour book.\n\nFrom the start, the brand was digital-first. Screen-native. Light-based. So when I checked the original files, there were no Pantone values. No CMYK intent. Just RGB.\n\nThat was not an oversight. It was simply where the design lived.\n\nOnly later did the question arise: if we ever want to print this properly, what _are_ these colours?\n\nLogo of our company\n\n## Two very different kinds of “print colour”\n\nThis is where something important finally became clear to me.\n\nPantone and CMYK are often mentioned together, but they are fundamentally different kinds of colour systems.\n\nPantone colours are _defined_. They are closer to pigments. They exist as named, specified inks that are mixed deliberately and printed as such. If you choose a Pantone colour at design time, you are making a conscious commitment to a physical colour.\n\nCMYK works differently. It is not a set of colours, but a _reproduction system_. Colours are built up from tiny dots of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, arranged in patterns that the eye blends together. It is about simulation rather than definition.\n\nThat distinction matters more than I realised.\n\nPantone answers the question:\n**Which colour do we want, materially?**\n\nCMYK answers a different one:\n**How can this colour be reproduced, reliably, at scale?**\n\n## The Pantone myth\n\nFor a long time, I implicitly assumed that Pantone values were somehow hidden inside files, waiting to be uncovered. That if you just looked hard enough, you would find “the real colour”.\n\nThat turns out to be wrong.\n\nPantone is not something you recover. It is something you choose.\n\nIf Pantone was not defined at design time, it does not exist. Anything you assign later is a closest match, a judgement call, an approximation. However precise it looks.\n\nThat was the first real eye-opener.\n\nQuick search for our logo colours.\n\n## CMYK as translation, not failure\n\nCMYK, by contrast, _is_ a translation.\n\nGiven an RGB or HEX value and a colour profile, the conversion to CMYK is deterministic and mathematical. The same input will produce the same output.\n\nBut it is also constrained.\n\nCMYK lives in a smaller colour space. Ink on paper reflects light; it does not emit it. Some colours simply cannot survive the translation intact.\n\nSo when people say CMYK “flattens” colours, that is not a technical failure. It is a physical reality.\n\nCMYK does not fail to express richness. It expresses the maximum richness that can be reproduced reliably.\n\nThat reframing changed everything.\n\nCYMK\n\n## What happened to the colours in that book\n\nWith that understanding, the comment about _A Dictionary of Color Combinations_ clicked into place.\n\nEarlier editions were closer to pigment-first thinking. Colour as material, ink, paper, light. Later editions prioritise reproducibility. Standardisation. Portability across printing processes.\n\nThe colours did not become flatter by accident. They became legible to a system.\n\nThat is not degradation. It is translation across worlds.\n\nAnd once you see that, the book does not lose its value. It gains context.\n\nCMYK at work in the book. Magnification with iPhone.\n\n## You can only define colour inside a system\n\nThis is the core insight I wish I had earlier:\n\nYou can only ever define colour _inside_ a system.\nMoving between systems always requires judgement.\n\nRGB, CMYK, Pantone, pigment. None of them are wrong. They just answer different questions.\n\nIf you start digital-first, you postpone certain decisions. When you later move to print, you are not uncovering hidden truths. You are making assumptions explicit.\n\nThat is not a mistake. It is a normal sequence.\n\n0:00\n\n/0:08\n\n1×\n\nRGB at work\n\n## Where this leaves me\n\nThis may sound like a narrow design concern, but for me it was a genuine moment of discovery.\n\nNot because I finally “understood print”, but because a whole area that used to feel fuzzy suddenly became legible. Colour stopped being something that either worked or didn’t, and became a set of choices, translations, and constraints that I can reason about.\n\nThat shift is oddly energising.\n\nIt raises better questions. It opens up new ways of thinking about branding, reproduction, and design decisions I had previously postponed or avoided. It also makes me look differently at objects like that colour dictionary, not as flawed or diminished, but as situated in a particular system with its own logic.\n\nI still love the book. I still use it.\nI just enjoy it more now that I understand what kind of space it occupies.\n\nAnd perhaps that is the real pleasure here: not having arrived at an answer, but having gained a new way of seeing, with many more directions to explore.\n\n### Further reading\n\n  * The difference between slides and photos\n  * The miracle of your screen\n  * Blue LED changed the world\n\n",
  "title": "Colour, systems, and the moment it clicked",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-10T08:53:41.645Z"
}