Note from a graphic designer who has to fix this shit all day: rich black is prettier sure but for the love of the gods don’t use it for text if it’s going on newsprint. If its anything other than solid black it will bleed out and become unreadable.
Half my job is fixing this mistake all day from people who really really should know better. And now you know!
Some advice from a person in print-media:
100% black always looks grey on your screen, but I promise it will look black when they print it. And please, for the love of God, please print black, not rich black.
The way professional printers work is that they go through four different passes, one for each color. And with each pass, there’s the possibility of variance–the printing not quite lining up with the previous pass.
This is especially evident in body text. Look at the image above–this is a registration error with only two colors. Imagine this with two more passes. Image it as an entire paragraph of size 12pt font. Think of reading an entire book like that.
If you want to print text in color pick a pre-mixed color like Pantone. They mix the color before they print it so it only does one pass–similar to a black process.
