Chapter 2 - Imagery in Print and on Screen

A) Introduction

The imagery available in Appendix A - Official Imagery Library is produced in several formats to meet the technical requirements of screen display and printing mediums. Before you decide which graphic file to download and use, you need to understand the medium upon which your eyeball will be looking. For the purposes of this Style Usage Guide we are breaking things down into two mediums: Print and Projection. Print includes any item you might hold in your hand; while projection includes various things such as a computer monitor; a TV Set; or a projector thrown against a screen.

Understanding the different ways these two mediums handle light is crucial to deciding how and what graphic to choose for optimum consistency with the visual standards this organization deserves. For instance, a graphic specifically designed to be displayed on a web site will look different when put into a magazine. But why is it so different? The answer is simple physics: Print Coloring uses Subtractive means to control which part of the light spectrum you see, while projection uses Additive means. In essence, the ink in print absorbs parts of the light spectrum and what is left is reflected back at you, and that is the color of what you see. On a screen, colored light is projected at you and the sum of the different amounts of colors determines what you see.

We all know that the colors of America are Red, White and Blue and that the coloring of primary imagery of the U.S. Coast Guard and Auxiliary are based on these three colors, but which red and which blue? As shown in Appendix B - Authorized Colors Chart you see that the Auxiliary, the Coast Guard, Homeland Security and the US Flag are different shades of red and blue. The variations in shading is one aspect of an organizations unique branding.

B) Print Mediums

The PANTONE^® Matching System (PMS)

In Spot Printing, printers put one colored ink to paper at a time, and the combination of these inks would give us the various shades we see, in the same way that a painter mixes paints to make a new color. Printing professionals developed standards for the inks they used so that customers would get the same results no matter what printing house to which they went.

Today there are several standards around the world. Here in the United States the most prevalent and widely used is the PANTONE^® Matching System (PMS) by Pantone, Inc. PMS is a proprietary coloring system and the actual true values of the inks are the property of Pantone, Inc. Materials listing the PMS colors are very expensive. Luckily, they have licensed to most of the higher end graphic manipulation software approximations of their colors so that we can get in the ball park. The significance of PMS to us is that this is accepted as the standard common denominator to define colors.

Example: The U.S. Department of State says that the colors of the Flag of the United States of America are Old Glory Blue (PMS 282 C) and Old Glory Red (PMS 193 C). From this information we can derive all else that we need to know to correctly create a graphic using computer tools.

4-Color Process Printing (CMYK)

Modern Process Printing, including the vast majority of desk-top ink-jet and laser printers in your home and/or office, uses a method of mixing four colors to create millions of possible color shades. Three ink colors used are Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow. Adding a fourth Key color of Black, we are given the acronym of CMYK. These colors are expressed in percentage of intensity, zero percent (0%) being no color used, up to 100%. Standard approximations of CMYK values for PANTONE^® colors exist giving us a method of converting values.

Example: "Old Glory" Blue comprises 100% of Cyan; 68% of Magenta; 0% of Yellow; and 54% of Key/Black. All inks at 100% combine to produce black.

C) Screen Projection

RGB Video

Color television sets and computer monitors are comprised of groupings of three colored projectors. These three colors are Red, Green and Blue (RGB). The intensity of these lights are expressed in levels from 0 to 255. The value zero means none of that color is projected, while 255 is full intensity.

Example: For "Old Glory" Blue the Red color is at zero while Green is projected at an intensity of 45 out of 255 and Blue 66 out of 255. All projectors at full intensity add together to give you a perceived pure white.

Web Safe

Although most computers and monitors these days can accept the more than 16 million color combinations available with the RGB System (256 to the 3rd power). Web developers still endeavor to limit their main coloring to a set of 215 "Web Safe" colors that are viewable by older machines. To meet their needs, web safe graphics are provided and listed in Appendix B - Authorized Colors Chart and are expressed in values from 0 to 255 in the decimal system (Base 10) or 00 to FF in the hexadecimal (Base 16) system.

Example: "Old Glory" Blue's Websafe RGB color is in decimal 0,51,102 and in hexadecimal #003366.

WebSmart

The WebSmart palette uses a 16-by-16-by-16 cube of 4,096 colors. The WebSmart palette uses any combination of hexidecimal values: 00, 11, 22, 33, 44, 55, 66, 77, 88, 99, AA, BB, CC, DD, EE, and FF, and provides a more complete gamut that should display consistently on monitors that support thousands (16-bit) and millions (24-bit) of colors. Most of the colors should dither to the nearest browser-safe color on 256-color monitors. This provides us an even closer approximation of way a graphic will look in print.

Example: "Old Glory" Blue's WebSmart RGB color is in decimal 0,51,102 and in hexadecimal #003366.

D) Summary

After you have chosen which graphic image you want to use, the next step is choosing the Color Category. In order to do this, you must decide what the end medium is going to be: A full color magazine; a home/office printed newsletter; a PowerPoint presentation; a video or a website. In this chapter we hope to have educated you enough to understand the differences in these mediums and why files of the same graphic you download from Appendix A - Official Imagery Library look different to you. If you are sending your graphic out to be printed by a commercial source, ask what format they require.

For Official Use Only as directed by applicable Commandant Instructions.
	The content available on this site, unless otherwise noted, is the work of United States Coast Guard Auxiliary personnel, taken or made during the course of a member's official duties. As works of the U.S. federal government, the content is in the public domain pursuant to 17 U.S.C. § 101 and § 105. Subject to disclaimers.

For Official Use Only as directed by applicable Commandant Instructions.

The content available on this site, unless otherwise noted, is the work of United States Coast Guard Auxiliary personnel, taken or made during the course of a member's official duties. As works of the U.S. federal government, the content is in the public domain pursuant to 17 U.S.C. § 101 and § 105. Subject to disclaimers.

United States Coast Guard Auxiliary — Style Usage Guide

CONTACT - Page last updated Sunday, September 9, 2007