Nineties CMYK

Desktop publishing arrived and put a printing press in front of people who had never set type. The obvious thing to do was use the four inks straight out of the box, and a decade of flyers came out of that.

Process cyan and process magenta are not colours anybody would mix by hand. They exist to be combined, so using them raw gives a picture a brightness that no chosen palette has.

Name the inks rather than the colours. Process cyan, process magenta, process yellow. Blue and pink give you something softer and wrong.

Let the inks overprint. Where cyan crosses magenta it goes violet, and showing that is what makes it read as print.

Add slight misregistration. A perfect stack of four plates looks like a screen, and this palette is about paper.

Use it for flyers, zines, record sleeves, streetwear and anything that should look cheaply and quickly printed.

Leave it alone for a photographic subject that needs accurate skin. Raw process ink is unkind to a face.

Eighties neon glows on black because it is light. This is ink on white paper, so the same loudness arrives by the opposite route.

Bauhaus primaries also uses three hues plus black, but they are red, yellow and blue and they never overprint. Here the mixing is the point.

Club flyers of the decade were printed four colour on the cheapest stock available, and the misregistration was not a choice. Wired put the same raw inks on a magazine deliberately in 1993 and made them look like the future.

The colours come back corrected and photographic. Say raw process inks with no colour correction.

The plates line up perfectly and it reads as a screen. Say slight misregistration on flat white paper.