White Ink Printing

When you want your colours to pop off specialty-coloured stock like brown earth-looking Kraft stock, and/or you want to include white elements in your design, our specialty white ink option will help achieve the look you're after.

6 min. read

One of our all-time favorite specialty ink color options, which is commonly requested, is the White Ink printing process.

Although it’s not a color, it’s a statement!

White Ink on, say, black or Kraft color card stock adds an embellishment that’s guaranteed to catch all the right attention.

While we refer to white ink as a fifth color, according to scientific definitions, it is not a color, but for our purposes of printing and keeping it simple, it is a color and is in addition to the four CMYK standard colors, which are Cyan, Yellow, Magenta, and Black.

That said, white ink is actually quite special. Adding white ink to your prints, especially for black stocks or Kraft, can level up your prints to make them look exceptionally more elegant than prints without the white ink.

Including white ink in your CMYK printing process will result in more vibrant colors and make your artwork and designs pop. These simple elements can boost your prints for aesthetic value and quality. This process is not easy, but it is worth the effort to produce high-definition colors for prints.

Achieving the perfect color schemes includes a cycle of pressing a few layers of the white ink to create the appropriate opacity. This is especially useful for Kraft paper since it usually has a solid and strong color that sometimes can cause the artwork or designs to appear faded or cloudy. If you check at the bottom, you’ll see the big difference that white ink can make for Kraft card stocks.

There are so many ways to utilise white ink. If you play around with it enough, it could make a big difference in your printing quality and create a bigger impact for your presentations and offline marketing solutions.

Why White Ink on Kraft Buffalo stock? 

CMYK Only


Earthy and Rustic

Kraft-card-white-only

White Ink Only 


Simple and Elegant 

Kraft-card-cmyk-plus-white

White Ink + CMYK Process


Make it POP

PLEASE NOTE:

As Kraft is not white, printing on Kraft the colour interacts with the brown stock resulting in a different colour outcome than if you print on white. We do not advise or recommend the use of light or transparent colours, as they will not stand out on this stock. For a pleasing outcome, all colours should be dark solids.


White Ink is our specialty fifth colour process which can help you take your kraft business card design to a whole new level of creativity. 

Please don't get us wrong, some people love the more subtle and rustic look of black and / or cmyk only on kraft stock. With the right designs for the right products this can be the right solution.

Traditional full colour CMYK print on natural kraft board

Full colour printing processes use a combination of cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink or toner (CMYK). Designed to be printed on a white base, CMYK colours are translucent so they can combine to achieve different colours and effects. As they are translucent (think coloured glass), when printing on a white card colours look solid and bright - but when printed on a coloured base like kraft stock, colours blend with the natural board colour.

Colours darker than the board will generally appear solid, but darker/ less vibrant than they would appear on white.

Colours lighter than the board for instance yellows or light shades may not be visible, or may look more like a watermark rather than a solid feel.

It is important to remember that white elements in standard CMYK designs have no ink/toner applied, showing just the white card underneath, so when these designs are printed on kraft card, they will have no fill and the kraft card will show in these areas.

Adding a white base for vibrancy

But what if you want more pop and vibrancy!

When you want your colours to pop off specialty coloured stock like brown earth looking Kraft stock, and / or you want to include white elements in your design, our specialty white ink option will help achieve the look you're after. 

By adding white as the fifth colour in the CMYK printing process, you can not only have white in your design, you can use it as a base layer to create more vibrant, and bright colours on coloured paper stocks.

*** NO TRANSPARENT COLOURS *** when printing with white ink all colours need to be set to 100% opacity. Transparent elements in designs will not work with white ink  

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