How to pick a colour pair for your record

Every record we press gets exactly two colours. That’s the whole rule, and it’s a better rule than it sounds. Two colours forces a decision. Three colours is a mood board, not a record.

Start with contrast, not taste

People come in wanting their favourite colour on a record, which is understandable and often a mistake. A single colour has no story once it’s pressed. What you actually want is contrast: warm against cool, light against dark, loud against quiet. Raspberry × Ultramarine works because pink is a shout and ultramarine is a wall it bounces off. Put two shy colours together and the swirl just looks muddy, like a puddle that used to be interesting.

The pairs that keep coming back

Some combinations get requested so often we’ve basically named them:

• Raspberry × Ultramarine, for anything that wants to look loud on a shelf
• Mustard × Verdigris, which photographs well and reads as summery without trying too hard
• Persimmon × Violet, our most requested pairing for anything remotely funk adjacent
• Leaf × Carbon, for people who say “I want colour but not too much colour”
• Raspberry × Mustard, soft and a bit retro, popular for wedding pressings

None of these are accidents. They all share enough tonal distance that the swirl reads as two things, not one smear.

What the swirl actually does

When we press, we’re not painting a pattern, we’re folding two ropes of heated PVC together under roughly 100 tonnes of pressure for about 25 seconds. The swirl you get is genuinely one of a kind: fold too much and it turns marbled and busy, fold too little and you get clean lava lamp bands. We usually aim for something between the two, enough movement to be interesting from across a room, enough restraint that you can still see both colours clearly up close.

A colour pair should look good from the door and hold up under a magnifying glass. Most don’t manage both.

Testing before you commit

We always press a small test batch before a full run, partly for quality control and partly because colour under studio light lies to you constantly. A mustard that looked rich on screen can turn out closer to school-bus yellow once it’s spinning under Bertha’s old lamps. If a test disc comes out wrong, it goes straight in the reject crate by the door, and we adjust the ratio and try again. It’s not glamorous, but it’s cheaper than a regretted colour of 300 records.

A word on trends

Pastel pairs had a moment, then everyone wanted something described as “moody,” which is a word that means almost nothing until you’re staring at four shades of grey trying to pick one. Our advice: choose the pair that matches how the record sounds, not what’s currently popular on other people’s shelves. A record you’ll still like the look of in five years beats one that matched a trend for five months.

Ready to see your own pair swirled together? Start your order.