Colour that survives a greyscale photocopier

Municipal briefings in Adjara are still copied. A mayor’s office will take our colour PDF, send it to a machine in the corridor, and hand greyscale stapled sets to members who arrived without a laptop. If your two series were turquoise and silver, they are now the same bar.

We test every briefing pack on the printer at Level 8, 39 Rustaveli Street, Batumi 6010, in black only. Direct labels on bars beat legends that sit in a coloured key. Pattern — dots, hatching, a hollow bar — beats a second hue. A ranked bar chart needs no colour at all if the ranking is the story.

Where colour remains, we keep one strong series and one light series, never three close blues. Water and waste can share a page if one series is a solid bar and the other is a line with markers. They cannot share a page as two fills that a copier will flatten.

Cover pages are where agencies waste ink. A photographic wash behind the title looks calm in a PDF and becomes a grey smear on the chamber copy, taking the page number with it. We print covers as type on uncoated paper. The figure on page 4 is what a member will mark.

If a donor pack must stay in colour because it will not be copied, say so in the inventory. We will still avoid red-green pairs, not as a fashion rule but because a colour-blind engineer in a utility meeting is a more common reader than the brochure implies.