Have you ever been disappointed when the colors on your screen don't seem as vibrant once you print them out on paper? If you've ever noticed a pretty obvious difference in color quality between physical and digital mediums, it is probably due to your color mode settings.
For instance, when designing for a screen (content that will be be consumed using technology) you need to make sure your color settings are set to the RGB model. That's Red, Green, and Blue. These are additive, primary colors of light, meaning that they can be combined in different ways to make every color of the rainbow. This includes combining all three, red, green, and blue colors to produce white. With this color model, red and green combine in white light to create yellow, green and blue combine to make cyan, and blue and red combine to make magenta.
Similarly, but in the opposite way, the CMYK color model is subtractive and builds towards black - except not complete, exact blackness that is completely void of chroma. With this spot color model, the yellow and cyan ink that you buy for your printer are layered over top of each other to create green. Cyan and magenta ink is layered to produce blue, and magenta and yellow ink is layered to make red. When all of three colors are printed on top of each other, an almost-black color is created. This is referred to as "Key" (the "K" in "CMYK") and explains how if your black ink cartridge was empty, you could still print your resume using the color setting on your printer and have the text come out looking nearly indistinguishable from black ink. In CMYK printing, whitespace is handled by not applying any ink in those areas. If your design uses white lettering, colored ink will be layered in the negative spaces around the text, using the natural color of the paper to reveal your text.
Now, what happens when you PRINT something using the RGB color setting? You get printed colors that appear muted, and dull. For this reason, it is notoriously difficult to print the more florescent colors and have them come out precisely as bright as they appear on your screen, even when you do use the right setting. Therefore, you may want to avoid using the most neon of colors in your branding as it may be hard to achieve consistency between your digital and printed deliverables.
So when it comes to the color of your branding, think ahead about all of the ways you intend to use it and how important it is for you to achieve 1:1 color matching across all of your platforms and deliverables.
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