Design For Print - Workshop 1

This session was about colour in print, and things we can do in Illustrator to help make it easier for ourselves when working with colour.

These things are appropriate for when designing for Digital Printing, Screen Printing, or Offset Lithography.

• We should think of the colour on the screen as ink on the paper.
• We should clear all the default swatches that are there to make it less confusing for ourselves, but leave registration, black, white and "none".

Using Global Colour

• Ticking the global colour tickbox after double clicking on a swatch will automatically change the colour of everything that swatch is used for when you change the swatch.
• A global colour is identified in the swatches side bar by the little white triangle that appears in the little colour box.
• You can use a tint of a colour to create more hues when limited to a certain amount of colours.

Spot Colours

• Spot colours may be more efficient and cost effective to use if your design only uses one colour.
• You can use a spot colour to give a more accurate colour match from computer to computer worldwide.
• When using a spot colour, you should use a Pantone colour.
• A spot colour is indicated by the dot in the triangle that indicates it as a global colour.

 

Saving Swatches

• You can save your swatch palette.

   

• You can load a previous swatch palette in a new document.

• By saving a swatch as an ASE file to a known location you can use that swatch palette in InDesign. You should save the swatch file in the folder you use for the InDesign file.