In this paper, we propose color design criteria for uniform color textures, and present a new colorant-based halftoning technique which meets these criteria, and hence generates high quality color halftones. The basic idea behind our halftoning method is to control the quality of each colorant texture separately along with the total dot distribution. In order to achieve this, we first set the total dot arrangement and then color the dots optimally without altering the total dot arrangement. This corresponds to a constrained optimization problem, and we solve this via the swap-only direct binary search (DBS) heuristic. Examples of color halftone images using our technique are compared to images obtained by a plane-independent color halftoning algorithm and by the HP 970 Cx inkjet printer driver.