Design Practice: Design for Print Workshop One

Working with colour:

Change preferences: plug ins & scratch disks - start up to scratch.
New document: colour mode - CMYK (print) RGB (screen).
Best desktop and interface for colour critical work is grey.
Change colour using fill/line colour picker, colour palette, swatches palette.
Swatch palette gives consistency.
There is a default set of swatches although you can set up your own.
Clear out all existing swatches - drag to bin, use cmd and shift to select multiple. Use swatches menu to select all swatches. Should be left with four: black, white, no fill and registration colour.

Registration colour is for trim, crop, registration and general printing marks.
To add new swatches go to colour palette, set ink percentages and choose a colour. Go to menu and click 'create new swatch'.

Another way is to have colours already on your art board, go to the swatches menu and click 'add used colours'.
This means you can get a colour scheme from an existing artwork.
The swatches added this way look different.

To change a swatch you can double click it and alter the ink mixture.
The swatches made using 'add used colours' is a global swatch. Any colour using this will be automatically updated if the swatch is changed. Nothing needs to be selected. A global swatch has a white triangle in the corner.
Using the colour palette you can alter the tint of a current swatch and then add the new one as another swatch.
Make sure no items are selected when you do this.
If the master swatch is edited then the tint swatches will be altered too.

Spot colour - a colour that isn't made of cyan, magenta, yellow or black. It is not processed colour but ready mixed ink.
They can make things look luminous. e.g fluorescent, metallic.
Can be significantly cheaper as it reduces the amount of times the stock is passed through the printing press.
Very similar to screen printing process, with regards to ready made ink. Although screen printing is a lot more work.
It is a lot more consistent than processed colours and a percent off would create a different tone. Spot colours make it easy for the same colour to printed countless times. Good for corporate logos and packaging.
To select a colour use a spot colour library. e.g pantone.
Each colour will have a specific reference number. So printers know the exact way to mix the ink.
To access within illustrator go to the swatch palette menu and click 'open a swatch library' then 'colour books'.
There are different books for alternate stocks.
You can search specific pantones if you find it in a printed library.
By clicking on a swatch from the library it automatically gets added to your personal list.
Tint swatches can also be added from these.

When you open a new document swatches are automatically reset.
To save a swatch group go to the swatch library and click 'save swatch library as al'. Save in the swatches folder and it will be easily available.
To access this go to 'open swatch library' and select 'user defined' then click your desired swatch name.
Another way is to save it in the same place as the work it relates to. This makes it easy to transfer.
Use the 'save as ASE' option to use in other programmes.

Design Practice