Do you read newspaper daily? If you’ve been reading the newspaper for a while now, you must have noticed four multicolored dots at the bottom of the page. But most people who read newspaper don’t know what exactly they are for. The read itself keeps you so occupied that your eye does not wander to minute details except for those mentioned in the stories.

Years ago, newspapers were only printed in one color, black. To upsell advertisers, the color was offered to make their ads stand out. The newspaper consists of 4 colored dots/hearts/squares at the bottom or on the edges. Here is the actual reason behind the multicolor symbols on the newspaper.

When printing an image that has more than one color, it is necessary to print each color separately and ensure each color overlaps the others precisely. If this is not done, the finished image will look fuzzy, blurred or “out of register”. To help line the colors up correctly, a system of registration is necessary.

Those four multicolored dots are called CMYK (cyan (blue), magenta (pink), yellow and black). CMYK are the base colors used while printing the newspaper. They can be of any shape – dots/hearts/squares on newspapers.

Basically, any color can be obtained by using these in correct proportions. Plates of all these colors are laid out on a page separately and lined up in the same spot while printing. This is necessary to print a full-color image accurately. If the images are somehow blurry and not crisp enough, you will find the colors overlapping or not on the same line.

Physically checking all the pages of the paper is not possible. For a printer, who has been doing this for years, knows what an apt CMYK looks like. So basically they serve as ‘printer’s marker‘. The CMYK marks are also printed in books but are removed when they are cut.

So the next time you see an image that is blurry, we are sure your eyes will turn to the bottom of your paper.