Black & White

Black and white printing is cheaper than colour, and can look really good on flyers and newsletters, especially if you print onto coloured paper. It is also ideal for mailings and documents for meetings.

Tips for black and white printing

• Design your artwork in black and white. Remember that colours will print in different shades of grey, so there’s not much point including lots of bright colours in the original if you will be printing it in black and white.
• Keep the background white. A coloured background will print in grey, and this can make it harder to read your text and generally looks a bit messy.
• Choose images with high contrast. Different colours won’t show up, so make sure you don’t have very similar shades next to each other. For example, a dark green and a dark blue will look almost identical in black and white. Instead, choose pictures with light colours against dark colours.
• Click here for more help with designing your artwork.

Choosing the right machine

The copyprinter makes a stencil and uses wet ink to print lots of copies of the same thing. It is a very cheap option if you are printing a lot of copies, and the quality is good for text, clip art and small photographs with good contrast.

If you are printing only a few copies, or you want to print artwork that is very dark, or contains lots of large photographs, you may prefer to use the laser printer. See our price comparison tables for more information about the differences in price between the types of printing.

Choosing your paper

You can print in black (and grey) on a range of colours of 80g paper and 160g card. Using coloured paper or card is a very cheap way of adding colour to your printing. We also have 100g paper in cream and white, and 200g silk finish card in white (for use on the laser printer only). A full list of the paper and card we have available can be found on our Paper and card page.