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What Colours Show Up the Best on Cardboard?



Packaging is a crucial element for any business that sells a product. You want to package your items in attractive, eye-catching materials that look good on a shelf. One of the most common packaging materials is cardboard. While white cardboard is available, kraft brown cardboard is much more common. If you want to create appealing packaging with cardboard, it is important to understand which colours look best when you want to print your company logo on a brown background.


Understand How Printing Colours Works

You must understand how colours look different when they are created on a computer versus how they appear when they are produced by a printer. Although they may look similar, computers and printers use different methods of colour creation so it is almost impossible to create the exact hue you want.


Computers use the RGB method to create colours using primary hues. They take red, green and blue and use these through shades to create other colours. In contrast, printers use the CMYK method of colour creation. They use cyan, magenta, yellow and black to create the colours you see on the cardboard material. This difference in computer colours and printed colours means that the logo on the cardboard box may not be an exact match to the shades on the computer. You must take this fact into consideration when designing your company logo.


Choose the Right Colour for Your Needs

Company logos come in many colours. It’s important to think about how your logo will appear on cardboard if you intend to use the material to package your products. Any colour will still work well on white cardboard, but if you plan to use the more common kraft brown cardboard, you need to be a little pickier about the hues you use in your logo.


Black always shows up best on a brown background. However, many companies want a more colourful logo and opt not to use black. Dark colours tend to show up the best on a cardboard box. Look at how dark blue, purple and green show up on a brown background. These darker hues pop more and provide better contrast for eye-catching packaging.

Red is a common colour for logos, but it does not show up well on a cardboard box. The reason for this is that ink seeps into the cardboard it is printed on. It is difficult to create a vibrant red hue on brown cardboard. You may be able to see the logo, but it will not be as crisp and vibrant as it looks on the computer.


For similar reasons, you should avoid using yellow or orange in your company logo if you want to print on cardboard boxes. These two hues barely show up on brown cardboard, so they are not useful for creating appealing packaging.


You may think that white ink will show up well on a brown background, but this is not true. Most printers don’t actually produce white ink. They simply produce the absence of colour in place of white space. This means that most printers can’t create spot colours to match white material. It’s very difficult for most companies to have white logos on a cardboard box, so you should opt for a darker hue.


Work With Kinsbrae Packaging

Designing an eye-catching corrugated cardboard box is important if you want to make your company products look more appealing to your customers. Custom box board packaging requires you to have your company logo printed on cardboard. Choosing the colours that will show up properly on the brown background is important. Kinsbrae Packaging is happy to customize cardboard boxes to meet your business’s needs. Contact us today to discuss your unique needs when it comes to cardboard boxes.

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