Ink Behaves

We bought a two-colour press mostly out of nostalgia and it has since become the most consequential piece of equipment in the studio, for a reason that had nothing to do with what we thought we were buying. Overprinting — laying one transparent ink over another so that the overlap produces a third colour — is a physical process with physical variables: ink film thickness, the order of the passes, how much the paper has already absorbed, the humidity in the room that afternoon.

A screen cannot model this and does not try. The overlap colour you get in a design file is a multiply blend, which is an arithmetic operation. The overlap colour you get on paper is a consequence of two pigments sitting in and on a fibre mat. They are related the way a weather forecast is related to weather. Every time we have shown a client a screen proof of an overprint, we have had to follow it with an apology and a real one.

What this changed in our practice is the sequence. We no longer choose colours and then print them; we print pairs and then choose. Forty overprint pairs on the actual stock takes an afternoon and produces a physical object the client can hold in the light of their own room, which ends colour discussions that would otherwise run for weeks. The colours that get chosen this way are consistently ones nobody would have picked from a swatch book, and consistently better.

There is a second, subtler thing. Working on a press makes you honest about how much of a design is decided by constraints you did not choose. Two inks is not a stylistic position; it is what the machine does. Paper takes ink at a rate you cannot argue with. Registration is imperfect, and the imperfection is visible, and after a while you stop treating it as an error and start designing so that it reads as evidence of the process rather than as a fault.

We are not going to claim this makes the work better in some general sense. It makes it specific, which is not the same thing but is usually more useful.