Matching colours can be tricky. There are at least four different ways of identifying a colour:

RGB is based on the projection of light.  It is a colour model in which red, green, and blue light are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colours.

A hex colour is a six-digit hexadecimal number used in website coding and other computing applications to identify a colour. The bytes represent the red, green and blue components of the colour.

Therefore hex colours and RGB are methods of identifying on-screen colours. There are different methods for identifying colours for print.

Pantone is a system for matching colours, used in specifying printing inks, it is generally used to identify corporate or brand colours.

Although a significant proportion of the world’s brands identify their colours using the Pantone system, the majority of the world’s printed material is produced using the CMYK process; this is done by mixing various amounts of 4 colours cyan, magenta, yellow and black.  Most of the Pantone system’s spot colours cannot be replicated using CMYK, the Pantone system uses 13 base pigments plus black and white mixed in specified amounts.

All of this underlines the fact that colours on screen and in print do not necessary correspond and exporting one to the other can cause issues. Pantones don’t necessarily work for digital print or for websites, and RGB and hex colours are unreliable ways of identifying a colour for print.

Some pantones do convert to CMYK, so you should ask your graphic designer to ensure to use one of those colours when they are creating your logo and brand identity, you should also ask them who to supply Pantone and CMYK details at the time they are working on your brand identity, so that you can to use them as references when printing, depending on what method of print you are going with.

Free Tool to Identify Colour Used on a Website

So how do I identify the hex colour used on a website?  I use a great free tool to for this. It is a toolbar extension called ColorZilla, it is available for Firefox and Chrome, here is the link to it in the Chrome store will give you the RGB and Hex colour used on any website and much more to boot.

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