White ink underlaying CMYK

Printing a white ink underlay under lighter or brighter text and images which would usually fail to print on a darker stock has mixed results and we definitely recommend a sample.

With regular white ink printing we get a double-hit of white so there’s a good coverage and intensity.

With CMYK and white ink there’s only one. So having a bright colour like yellow over the white isn’t going to render close to what you have on screen, it will be less intense. With paler colours there can be patchiness with the white showing through.

Hmm... are there other options?

Another option to achieve your design (and might work better than the white ink underlay) is a full colour print to achieve colours that are lighter or contrasting on a different colour background.

Although we don’t recommend printing large areas of solid colour, technology improvements and some new stocks means that with smaller runs (under 100 pieces) you’ll get something that’s pretty good.

Options Vellum, Silk 350 and Boston 350 are good choices. Depending on the colours chosen there may be some slight variance between all the prints and banding.

Okay, how do I do the underlay?

If you do want to try the white ink underlay, you’ll need to follow these instructions exactly, paying special attention to the placement of the layers and the overprint check box.

• Create a new spot colour in your swatches panel.
  It MUST be named SpotColor_White – spelled exactly that way.
• Make it 100% Magenta only CMYK (0/100/0/0)
• Double check that the colour type is definitely set to “Spot Color” and not “Process Color” which is usually the default.
• The white ink spot colour layer will need to be on top.
• Under the attributes panel, you will need to ensure that everything in the spot color is set to “Overprint Fill” or ("Overprint Stroke" if it's just linework) – this tells the printer that it needs to print the white layer first, then print the CMYK on top.

When you've placed your order and sent us the artwork we'll always check to make sure you've set it up correctly.