White Floods

Without a doubt, the first thing a designer will want to know how to account for adding white ink to show through on your design.

Since a CD is silver grey and clear plastic. If you print color on the disc without adding a white background your colors will come out muted. Since Illustrator (the final layout program) does not recognize white as anything - any area that is white gets no ink and thus would be silver. You have to think of it the same way of printing on regular paper using a laser or color ink jet at home. If you left an area white on your page, then the printer would not print anything. The same deal with CDs. Leaving an area in Illustrator white will result in the silver to show through. The silver is from the aluminum buried inside the CD. Without adding a white background (flood) it would be similar to using dark grey colored paper. 

To achieve a full white background using color images, request a WHITE FLOOD on your order forms.  

Need A Black and White Image?

Above image shows a Film Positive with the "Black" parts developed.
Film Positive Labeled "100% White Flood" and then the final Printed Composite. 

Without white floods providing contrast, your greyscale image will be mostly lost into the silver of the disc. 
 

Silver Knock-Outs

You specify silver or the clear part of the CD by leaving that area white on your template page layout and by NOT requesting a white flood on your order forms. 

 Film labeled PMS Blue 072

 Film labeled PMS Red 032

Printed result in composite shown below:

Anywhere in your design that you do not specify a color results in the silver of the disc showing through.

What to do if you want one of these spots to be white ink?

Since white does not show up in a Pantone Formula swatch book it does not show up in your page layout program either! So what to do? Well, you can create your own custom spot color and label it "Spot White" and give it some degree of tint so you can see it on your page. Or you can substitute or swap out a regular process or PMS color in it's place.

In the example below we colored our element using PMS100 and simply annotated our template:

Printed result in composite:

You can substitute color anytime you make it very clear and obvious. Make comments in your template file, your order forms and make sure you check your proofs carefully.