Two-colour poster: how to design with a limited palette

Why limits work: a print habit

Limited palettes come from printing. In screen printing and risograph, every colour is a separate screen or drum and a separate pass through the machine, so two colours cost less than four and line up more easily. Designers learned to get everything out of two inks: a dark one for type and shadows, a bright one for the image or the accent, and the paper as a third colour. Where the inks overlap they mix into a fourth, for free. The risograph effect guide goes deeper into that look.

On screen the cost is gone, but the benefit stays. A tight palette gives a series a recognisable voice, makes a feed of posts look like a set, and saves you from the most common beginner’s problem: colour everywhere and nothing standing out.

Choosing two inks and a paper

Start with value, not hue. The two inks and the paper should differ clearly in lightness: a near-black, a bright mid-tone and a light paper. Squint at the design, or imagine it in grey: if the bright ink and the paper merge, the picture will vanish.

Pairs that work: black and fluorescent pink; navy and orange; dark green and acid yellow; deep violet and coral; black and signal red. Choose an off-white, cream or pale grey paper rather than pure white; it softens the contrast and looks like paper stock rather than a screen.

Give one ink the job of the accent and keep it in one place. On this post the type, the labels and the frames are ink on paper; every bit of colour lives in the animals and in the heat bar that explains them.

The gradient map does the work

A gradient map reads each pixel’s lightness and swaps it for a colour from a ramp: the darkest tones take the first stop, the lightest the last. With two stops you get a classic duotone; with a dark ink and the paper colour alone, a one-ink print. It works on any photo, which is why it is the quickest way to make pictures from different sources look like one set.

Two tips. Fix the tones before the map, with levels or a curve, because the map only repaints what it is given: a flat photo gives a flat print. And cut the ramp into a few flat bands if you want a screen-print look; three or four bands read as separate stencils. For a quick one-off, the duotone generator does just this in one click.

Common mistakes

Two colours of the same lightness, which print as one muddy colour. An accent used everywhere, so it stops being an accent. Pure white paper, pure black ink and a neon in between, which looks harsh; warm the paper a little. And forgetting the type: if the headline is in the bright ink, the picture should lean on the dark one, and the other way round.

Made in Paletoo

Every picture on this page was made in Paletoo — these three with the same steps on other templates:

Step by step in Paletoo

1. Press “Open in Paletoo” to open the Silence post as your own document. Layers shows a panther and a smaller hare, both photos of bronze sculptures, the headline, mono labels in dashed frames and a heat bar.

2. Click the headline, “silence is a skill”, to select it. The Design tab shows its frame, and Typography its font, Inter Tight at 150 px, set tight with negative tracking and flush left, in the document’s ink colour.

   

3. Click the panther and open the Effects tab. Under Applied are three steps: Levels, which opens up the bronze’s tones, Gradient map, which repaints them from deep violet through pink and orange to mint, and Shadow, a soft orange glow behind it.

   

4. Click the Gradient map row to open it. The Gradient ramp holds seven stops, darkest on the left; Contrast sharpens the picture before it is mapped, Reverse flips the ramp, and Levels, now off, cuts it into flat bands. The cards offer other ramps, from Heatmap to Noir.

   

5. To use your own picture, select the panther and press Replace picture: the new one comes out in the same heat colours. An object or an animal on a plain background works best; Remove background cuts one out of a busy photo first.

6. Double-click the headline to write your own, then press Export for a 1080 × 1350 PNG for the feed, or a PDF with Include bleed to print it.

Make it your own

For a true two-ink look, open the Gradient ramp, pick stops and press Remove stop until two are left — a deep violet and a hot pink, say; a ramp always keeps at least two. Or start from Noir or Blue duotone, which are two-colour ramps already, and change their colours.

Raise Levels in the step to 3 or 4 for a screen-print look: the panther turns into flat bands, as if each tone had its own stencil. Keep the Shadow glow in the same family as the ramp, or switch it off with its eye for a cleaner print.

The ink, the paper and the glow are colour styles. Click an empty part of the canvas and change them under Colour styles in the Design tab; the type and the glow follow. The hare carries the same three steps, so if you change the panther’s ramp, change the hare’s too and the pair still match.

Make it online

• Poster makerMake a poster from a template that already has the layout right, then export a print-ready PDF or an image for screens.
• Duotone, halftone and glitch photo effects onlineThree of the strongest looks for a photo, each one click away and every step still yours to tune.
• Photo effects onlineGive a photo a film, print or glitch look in one click — and keep every step editable afterwards.

Free design templates: Poster templates