Using color inside the pages
Authors usually arrive at color with the question already settled — the charts are blue and orange because that is what the spreadsheet made them. The useful question comes earlier than that, and it is not which colors. It is whether anything on these pages needs color at all.
The money side of that answer lives in Color inside the book, and what it costs, and it is worth reading before you design anything. This guide is about the design side: what color does on paper, and what it fails to do.
Design it to work in gray first
Take any figure you were planning to print in color and ask what happens when the color is removed. If the answer is that it still works but looks plainer, the color is decoration. If the answer is that it stops meaning anything, the color is load-bearing — and that is usually a fault in the figure rather than a reason to print in color.
A chart whose series are told apart by hue alone fails twice. It fails in a black-and-white printing, where a red line and a green line of similar lightness become the same gray. And it fails on a color page for any reader who does not see those two hues as different, which red-green deficiency makes common enough that you will have such readers.
Both failures have one fix, and it is free: distinguish by something other than hue. Line weight, dash pattern, a label sitting on the line itself, hatching instead of fill. Do that and the figure works in gray, works in color, and works for readers whose color vision differs — and the decision about whether to print it in color becomes a decision about appearance rather than about comprehension. Tables, charts and data in a printed book goes further into building the figures themselves.
Where color earns its place
There is a short list of material where color is the information, not a coat of paint on it.
- Photographs, where the tones are the subject — though many photographs convert to gray beautifully, and some are better for it.
- Anatomical, botanical and scientific illustration, where a structure is identified by its color.
- Art reproduction, where a gray plate is not a cheaper version of the painting, it is a different object.
- Children's picture books, where the pictures are half the text. See Children's book interiors.
- Cookbooks, where the photograph of the finished dish is doing the selling. See Cookbooks: the hardest easy book to make.
- Anything with a color key you cannot design away — a geological map, a paint chart, a swatch book.
If your book is not on that list, the honest answer is usually that it does not need color pages.
Where it does not
Three uses account for most unnecessary color interiors, and all three have a better answer in black ink.
Colored headings. A chapter number in the brand color is doing a job that size, weight and space already do better. Hierarchy is built from contrast in scale, not in hue, and it survives every format the book ever appears in.
Tinted boxes. A panel of text on a pale tint reads as a design on screen and as reduced contrast on paper. Rules and indentation mark a box just as clearly at no cost to readability — see Legibility, and the readers you are leaving out.
Colored text for emphasis. Italic already exists, is understood by every reader, and carries into the ebook, the audiobook script and the large print edition without a decision.
In the Interior Formatter. It sets interior ink black-only by default, which is exactly what a black-and-white printer expects to receive, and it checks every image you place against the size it will actually print at, so a photograph that is about to land soft tells you before the proof does. Start your interior → · about the Interior Formatter
Paper is not a screen
Ink on uncoated book paper has a narrower range than a backlit display, and the difference shows up in two predictable ways.
Saturated colors flatten. The electric cyan and the neon green that look vivid on your monitor sit outside what the press can lay down, and what comes back is a duller, chalkier version. Dark tones fill in: deep shadows, dark blues and near-blacks lose their separation and read as one flat mass, because ink spreads slightly into the fiber. The same effect is why covers come back darker than they looked — Why your cover prints darker than it looked explains the mechanism.
Plan for mid-tones with real separation between them, and never rely on detail that lives only in the darkest or the most saturated part of an image.
A tint behind text deserves its own warning. Contrast between the type and what it sits on is what makes text readable; a tint spends some of that contrast to draw a box. On paper you cannot get it back by turning up a brightness slider.
The hybrid most authors miss
You do not have to choose between a color book and a gray one. A black-and-white interior with a color plate section — the photographs grouped into one block of pages — gets the images printed properly without carrying color through the whole book.
The tradeoff is that the plates sit away from the text that discusses them, so the writing has to refer to them by number rather than by position. Whether the arrangement saves anything depends on how your printer bills color, which the cost guide covers. Photo inserts and plate sections covers how to build one.
The ebook has no ink
Color costs nothing in an EPUB. There is no press, no page count and no per-copy manufacturing to pay for, so the photographs that break the economics of a printed book are free in the digital edition.
That is not a reason to design two unrelated books. It is a reason to decide the print interior on its merits, knowing the color version already exists for readers who want it. EPUB and print PDF are two different books sets out how far the two editions can sensibly diverge.
Typeset your book
The Interior Formatter is free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript, and it sets real pages you can read before you commit to anything. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Photo inserts and plate sections · Also in this guide: Color inside the book, and what it costs · Tables, charts and data in a printed book · Putting images inside a book