What's the Difference between CMYK, RGB, HEX and Pantone Colours?
Are you working with a web designer who asked for your HEX colours? Or saw the letters CMYK the last time you filled the ink cartridges in your home printer?
What are these colours? Is there a difference between them? Does it even matter which one you use?
These are all colour systems. And it does matter which one you choose if you want your colour to look correct on your project.
CMYK
If you’ve ever refilled the cartridges in your home or office printer you are probably familiar with the letters CMYK. This colour system is used for printing, from home and office printers, to professional offset and digital printing for things like brochures and signage.
CMYK stands for Cyan (C), Magenta (M), Yellow (Y) and Black (K). These colours are printed in large & small dots that overlap to produce a wide variety of colours. This is also called four-colour process printing. Each colour is measured percent, from 0-100 of each colour, with 100 being the darkest.
This is the most common colour process for printing, but it is the colours that it can create are limited and often don’t produce the bright colours you see on screen.
Pantone
You might be most familiar with Pantone from their Color of the Year which is said to represent “the global mood”. This year’s colour (2025) is PANTONE 17-1230 Mocha Mousse, a “warming, brown hue imbued with richness. It nurtures us with its suggestion of the delectable qualities of chocolate and coffee, answering our desire for comfort.”
Pantone colours are used in printing when an exact colour match is needed, usually for a logo. They are sent to printers as premixed inks or created using their proprietary formula.
In order to make sure of the match, they’ve also created the Pantone Matching System (PMS), which is a book of swatches showing their colours. They’ve also created swatch books for designers and printers showing how their colours look when converted to other colour systems like CMYK or HEX.
RGB
Your computer, television & phone all use RGB or a combination of Red (R) Green (G) & Blue (B) lights to create their colours on screen. Each colour is measured from 0-255. Removing all the colours (0,0,0) creates black. If you use the largest amount for each colour (255, 255, 255) you will get white.
Since this colour system is made from light, RGB is known for being able to make vibrant colours which often can’t be reproduced in print.
You can also sometimes see this colour system as RGBA, where A, or Alpha represents opacity. This number will be from 0.0 to 1. 0.0 means the colour is fully transparent. 1 will give you a fully opaque colour.
HEX
The HEX colour system is used web design and development. This system might look complicated, but really, it’s just another way to represent RGB colours.
Why use this system? One of the reasons web designers use it is that it’s little bit more predictable than RGB. HEX colours are always combination of 6 letters and/or numbers, while RGB can range from 3 numbers to 9. These 6 numbers and letters can be combined to create over 16 million exact colours.
Black RGB (0,0,0) HEX #000000
White RGB (255,255,255) HEX #FFFFFF
There are other colour systems that you may see such as HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) and HSB (Hue, Saturation, Brightness), but CMYK, Pantone, RGB and HEX are the most common.
Which one should you use? Choose CMYK for print unless you need an exact match, RGB if you are putting pictures on social media and HEX for your website.
