If you’ve ever had a logo designed or worked with a printer chances are you’ve heard the terms CMK, RGB and Pantone before. Besides being used by designers and printers, these color profiles are also used by a variety of industries.

RGB stands for red, green and blue and represent the primary colors of visible light. RGB’s color spectrum is roughly 16 million hues of light which is why it is for all digital screens. And because RGB is light based, it is an additive color so when combined in equal amounts, red, green, and blue appear as white.

CMYK, on the other hand, stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black, the standard color set for print based products. And because CMYK is pigment based it can only produce around 6,000 colors with varying levels of cyan, magenta and yellow producing most of the color then black is used to darken hues created by the other three colors.

Then finally, PMS which stands for Pantone Matching System®. This system is used by printers around the world to select, specify, match, and control ink colors. The matching system is quite extensive and is widely used in the print, textile and car industries to assure colors are consistent across all manufacturing facilities.

For businesses, knowing what your company’s colors are in RGB, CMYK, and PMS is extremely helpful as it helps you stay consistent no matter what media you are using. It’s also good to note that colors will look similar to each other but not exact. That is because as you go from RGB to CMYK to Pantone the color spectrum shrinks substantially resulting in some color variance across the three profiles.

When picking colors for your brand try to use PMS because most colors have a conversion already done for CMYK and RGB. So go forth and find the perfect color, just remember to choose wisely. I’m Sarah from Third Angle with your Marketing Minute.