Recently I experienced the agony of trying to get the colour gold printed on a series of products that I designed and this is what I discovered.
On our first try using digital print, the resulting colour was a greenish brown colour. Nowhere close to Gold
On our second try using offset print, the resulting colour was still a greenish brown, a military camo colour.
On the third try, instead of using CMYK, we dropped the K and print using CMY instead using offset printing. The resulting colour is totally different from the first and second try, this time it is a brown.
In conclusion, the colour Gold cannot be reproduced by both digital and offset printing. The only way to get the colour Gold accurately is to print using Pantone Gold Ink, which was confirmed by our client calling Pantone themselves, and the resulting colour is a shiny Gold. So whenever you come across the colour Gold for future projects, save yourself time and stress, print using Pantone colour. It is the only way to get the job done right.
