If you do any kind of color printing, whether it be personal photographs, fliers for an event, or a professional design project, all of your print jobs have one thing in common: the ink or toner that goes on the page. It is easy to overlook the technology you use every day, but I am the curious type. Have you ever wondered how color ink is made?
Colored inks have been made for many centuries, however, it took a long time for people to figure out the most effective mixtures of ingredients. Early inks were predominantly black or off-black and were used for writing. However it did not take long for people to realize that ink had its own pleasing texture that is very different from paint, and color inks came into use.
There are two kinds of color inks: pigment based inks, and dyes. Both use natural coloring from a variety of vegetable, animal and mineral sources. The main difference is that pigment inks have larger particles that settle on the surface of the page, whereas dyes have the color fully dissolved in them and stain it into the fiber of the page itself. Most modern printers use pigment inks, because they are less likely to bleed and result in higher quality images. Toner is essentially a dry form of pigment that is put onto the page with heat in a laser printer.
It is amazing how many millennia of human ingenuity went into devising the things we now take for granted. All of your print jobs rely on discoveries that go back to ancient times. Who knew!