How is the number of colours counted? How to choose them

You have probably been searching on our online store, for personalized adhesive tape for your company, to be used daily to close boxes, so that you can have an absolutely unique packaging. You may have chosen the most popular of our custom tapes, i.e., the standard propylene adhesive tape, the model which boasts the best value for money.

From there, you have found out that you can print on a white, transparent, and brown background, as well as possibly on a custom colour background. But that’s not all: you have noticed that you can also choose the number of printing colours for the actual customization, and therefore for the printing of your company’s name, your logo, slogan, and so on.

In this case, you are aware that you can automatically request printing with one, two or three colours, with the cost of the stereotype varying significantly between one option and the other.

You also notice that we give the ability to print with more than 3 colours, by sending a specific request to our e-mail address for custom quotes (preventivi@acitsrl.com).

At this point, you may have a question: how is the number of colours counted? Since the number of printing colours affects the final price of your order, you rightly want to know what affects this rate!

How is the number of colours counted?

You should know, then, that the number of printing colours is defined by counting the colours for customization, which can be 1, 2, 3 or many more: our printing machines do not place limits in this regard. The default or custom background colour is an element in its own right.

But beware: sometimes you can get 3 colours using only 2, or you can get 2 colours using only 1. Should you decide to print from 6 colours upwards, instead, the actual number of colours becomes irrelevant, and it doesn’t further affect the price of customizing your double-sided adhesive tape. Let’s have a deeper look at these aspects!

The trick that gets you a third colour from a 2-colour print

As you know, except for primary colours, you can get any other colour by mixing other shades in the right way. You can get light blue by mixing blue with a little white, green by combining yellow and blue, and so on.

But it must be noted that, in order to obtain the appearance of a colour to the eyes, it isn’t necessarily essential to actually mix two colours. For example, let’s imagine a roll of industrial double-sided tape meant to close boxes, with a white background and blue writing. What if you also want light-blue details on that strong double-sided tape?

Well, you can print an area with tiny blue dots. To the human eye, that area – shaped like a star, a letter, a circle, a line, and so on – will seem to be light blue, obtaining a third colour using, in fact, only two colours (or, in truth, only one in print because, in this case, the background is already white).

This is a practical trick, called screen printing, to make custom double-sided tape richer, while reducing printing cost. 

Four-colour printing for the customization of adhesive tapes

As anticipated, the printing cost for adhesive tape customization doesn’t change anymore over a certain number of colours. This applies to all customers who choose to customize their own PVC, PPL, or reinforced paper adhesive tape with more than 5 colours, i.e., from 6 colours upwards.

In that case, the printing “technique” changes, becoming the four-colour kind, which offers the ability to use from 6 to 256 colours. When the switch to four-colour is made, in fact, all limitations are eliminated.

Four-colour printing stems from the 4 CMYK colours, i.e., from the three primary colours (cyan, magenta, and yellow) plus black. With this combination, on a practical level, it is possible to obtain about 70% of the colours visible to the human eye, just about anything can be printed faithfully.

The number of colours needed to define the price of industrial double-sided adhesive tape customization is then considered as up to 5; from then on, the actual number does not affect the price of the print.