I have a box of medications for a throat pain and there is a total of five small circles. Four of them are the perfect representation of CMYK colors, so cyan, magenta, yellow and black. The fifth one is a shade of green that’s used for the text on the white paper box. The names of the four CMYK colors are also written on the box in their respective colors.
Not every medication box seems to have these colors. But yesterday I threw away an empty paper box of cough meds, that also had CMYK colored circles printed on it.
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That’s just test spots for the techs setting up and adjusting the printing press that printed the box. Not unique to medicine boxes; you can find the same stuff on food packaging too.
if the box has been printed using lithographic methods, eg a printing press from 4 sheets of film (C,M,Y,K) then it needs to be on register. this means all lined up and working, essentially.
Registration marks show the colours it printed – and the alignment (targets, crosshairs). If it doesn’t have this, it was likely done on a digital run, so the printer itself will handle registration.
It’s part of the printing process for the packaging. The dots show the colour requirements for the brand and whether or not the print run is in register (colours are where they should be). It’s to make sure the press is using the exact colours needed for the brand and they all look identical when printed.
It’s a common feature of packaging for pretty much anything. The packaging is printed only using the colors on the test strip. If any of the colors are *missing* from the little boxes its an indicator that there was an error in the printing and a color was missed or applied incorrectly. For example the “cyan ink cartridge” (or whatever they use) was empty or misaligned or something like that.
As noted, these are alignment marks for the various ink colors. CMYK everybody knows about. But you often see one or several other colors. These are specific inks, called “spot colors”, which are used so that the key “trade dress” features on the packaging are rendered accurately every time. Starbucks’ green is a good example.
This is important for marketing / branding reasons, but also for legal reasons. Your “registered trademarks” actually precisely specify the colors in the registration documents, and being sloppy about that is a good way to lose your trademark protection.
Also some spot colors are used for effects you cannot get with CMYK at all. Shiny “gold foil” is a popular example.
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