Comments on: CMYK colors in CSS: Useful or useless?

By: Lea Verou

Lea Verou — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 12:23:00 +0000

Nice writeup, liked

I was thinking of the print profile that Photoshop uses, since most people are accustomed to that (I’d argue that a very small precent changes the color profiles).

By: Brainflakes

Brainflakes — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 09:19:00 +0000

I’m afraid there’s something of a misunderstanding of CMYK when displayed on a monitor. Because your monitor is RGB all colours are RGB whether specified in CMYK or not. To display CMYK colours they are converted to RGB. All professional graphics programs have various colour profiles to try and emulate what CMYK looks like when printed, but each different combination of printer and paper has a different profile which converts to different RGB values and displays differently on a monitor.

Without a custom paper / printer profile, CMYK is converted more directly so CMYK magenta (0% C, 100% M, 0% Y, 0% K) *IS* RGB Magenta (100% R, 0 G, 100% B). They are literally the same colour when viewed on a PC monitor. Same goes for 50% M 100% Y, it’s identical to 100% R 50% G. If you had a printer profile, which one would you use? The user’s printer (So everything looks different on everyone’s PC)? A set custom profile (but which one?)

Basically for screen use it makes absolutely no sense to specify in CMYK, because PCs can only display RGB. It would be better design a site in CMYK in your favourite graphics editor with your preferred CMYK profile, then convert it to RGB and grab the colours for CSS use ( It seems slightly strange to be designing directly in CSS rather than creating a design in a graphics package and then building the CSS from that anyway)

Now where CMYK would be useful in CSS is where you are creating a webpage that’s meant to be printed, which is how I actually found this page. Unfortunately as of 07/2011 there is still no browser support for CMYK colours.

By: Abhijit

Abhijit — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 11:55:00 +0000

So true..After migrating from graphic designing its a pain to change my design profile every time i design for the web. Also it would be easier for a developer to just in corporate a Ai design with the colors gettin messed up…
I so expected to see this property in the new CSS3…no such luck yet (*fingers crossed*).
Great Article..good to see am not alone..

By: Lea Verou

Lea Verou — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 17:25:53 +0000

I wrote “However, no browser supports it yet” in my article. Unfortunately, even after 1.5 year, this is still true, along with many other nice CSS3 features that are not fancy like rounded corners or drop shadows so nobody cares about implementations.

By: Website Design Sheffield

Website Design Sheffield — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 10:35:10 +0000

I just tried using this on a H3 element in the html side, not the CSS with this: ‘cymk(15,100,100,0) !important;’ and it didn’t work.

I would also add a poll to this post considering your asking for views on something with a like or dislike answer!

try wp-polls plugin

Thanks