Colour specifications for printed mesh

Pantone colours vs CMYK colours

When you’re using printed banner mesh for promotional purposes, you want it to look great! So ensuring you understand how your logo and images will translate onto mesh during the printing process is an important first step.

Whether you plan to supply us with logos and images to produce a design for you or provide ready to print artwork, this article will help you understand the differences in the end product that can occur due to the printing process particularly regarding the use of CMYK vs Pantone colours.

What is printed banner mesh?

Printed banner mesh is generally used as a privacy or anti-gawking screen, to limit the amount of dust and debris being emitted from your work site, or to advertise your project or brand.

Jaybro is a leading printer of large format banner mesh for the Australian civil construction and building industries. We print everything from small banners to suit a single temporary fence panel, right through to kilometres of mesh for some of the country’s biggest infrastructure projects.

Naturally, if you’re using banner mesh to showcase your brand, you want to ensure that your logo and images are reproduced as closely as possible to the original.

So, here’s an outline of our printing process, print specifications and how to get the best results on your full colour printed mesh.

How your corporate design will translate to printed mesh

There are two types of mesh available - premium or open weave (which allows more air to pass through).

Premium banner mesh gives very high print quality because 80% of its surface is printable. This means the image translates with excellent quality onto the plain white mesh substrate.

Open weave mesh has only 50% surface area to print on, however, the overall effect especially with bold block designs and colours is often nearly as good as premium mesh.

Your particular design or logo might lend itself to a certain type of mesh – feel free to send your images through and our design consultants can offer advice. Likewise, particular colours may look better on a specific type of mesh, so get in touch with our team for advice on the best choice for your project.

Our mesh printing process

Many of our clients choose a full colour print which is applied to the plain white mesh in our printing facility. You can also choose to have a simple logo or single image repeated on the existing plain white background.

Our printing press uses a CMYK printing process, where pink, yellow, blue and black inks are overprinted to form all colours of the rainbow. We use Absorb-Plus inks which offer vibrant colour and excellent longevity in outdoor conditions.

Naturally, however, the sun’s ultraviolet rays will affect the brightness and saturation of colours over time, so the mesh will always look it’s best when new. Although banner mesh is UV treated for longevity, it is a consumable item and it will eventually wear and the fade slightly, especially when used in demanding conditions such as on construction sites.

Our premium banner mesh can last up to 3 years on site, and our open weave mesh lasts up to 1 year. When looked after well, the mesh can often be used for many projects, plus it is easy to roll up and use over and over at different sites.

Pantone colour cards

Colour differences in Pantone vs CMYK colours

CMYK is another name for four colour or full-colour printing.

It stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black and is the type of printing you’d typically find in an office printer. The printer - whether it be printing on paper or huge rolls of banner mesh - will print different concentrations of the four colours to create full colour images.

Pantone printing however uses exact trademarked Pantone colours of inks, and requires a lot of additional setup and configuration of a printing press.

For this reason, many banner mesh printers use the more cost effective CMYK processes to keep prices down for customers. The trade-off is a very slight difference in the colour of the end product, which can be more noticeable on some images than on others.

In most cases, Pantone or spot colours can be achieved with a CMYK process but if you have extremely bright colours in your logo or you’ve had problems with other printing suppliers in the past, we recommend you give our team a call first.

We can do our best to match your Pantone colours, but we can't guarantee an absolutely perfect match. We will endeavour to print as close as possible to your corporate colour using our CMYK printing press.

Unfortunately, we cannot use spot colours, RGB or Pantone colours in their original state, so the best course of action is for you to supply your artwork converted to CMYK. This will also help ensure fast turnaround and the best adherence to your original colours.

Why order printed mesh from Jaybro?

Mesh provides privacy and security, screening off expensive equipment and small items on your building site that could be subject to theft. Many workplace safety authorities require contractors to control dust and debris on site, and banner mesh is a cheap and effective way to meet these requirements.

And of course, the ability to print striking full colour graphics on banner mesh means you’ve got a huge ready-made canvas to advertise your project.

If you’d like to find out more about banner mesh printing, give our friendly branding team a call or message us for instant advice.