OUGD504 - Design for Print: Creative Suite Session 1

CMYK Printing
Usually the lighter colour is printed first such as Cyan or Yellow. There is a transparency to the ink which makes the colours mix when printed on top of each other. Black is the key colour to printing.

Colour in Illustrator
By using the swatch palette you can use the same colour again and again as it is saved here.

You can select the option of 'Select All Unused'. This highlights all the swatches that aren't being used, and you can click on the trash icon to delete these.

Once they're deleted the swatch palette looks like this.

You can also change the view of the swatches to a Small List View which is better as it tells you the colour name. 

Registration is specifically for printer's marks, such as crop and trim marks.

You can create a new swatch, and it is useful to keep the swatch name as its CMYK values because then we know what is used in the colour and is good to know for printing. You do this by clicking the new swatch icon next to the trash icon.

You can also do this by going on the colour palette, making a colour and selecting Create New Swatch from the meun.

We then created some shapes and added different colours to them.

To create a swatch of these colours I went on the Swatches tab and clicked the option Add Used Colours.

The swatches palette now has all the colours I've used. The cut corner and the grey square which have appeared on these particular swatches means because the Global option is ticked. The Global option means if you change the colour swatch it updates automatically without having to be selected. So if you have complicated artwork, with lots of objects in one colour, you can edit the swatch and everything will update rather than having to select each piece individually. 

So if I have several squares in navy, I don't have to select them to change each one.

I just double click on the swatch, and because it is global, I can change the settings and they all change.

You can also work with tints with global colours. By going onto the Colour palette, you can change the tint of it rather than the values.

You can then create a new swatch of this, and it has the percentage of the tint next to it.

You can change the colours of the boxes by selecting the shape and then selecting the specific swatch.

If you change the swatch which is 100%, it actually changes all the tints, and you don't need to select any of the shapes.

Process and Spot Colours

The term Process colour referes to CMYK and the four plate printing process.

A spot colour is a pre mixed ink, which does not use CMYK. If you are commissioned to do a one or two colour print job, it will be cheaper to use a spot colour because it uses less plates.

Using process and spot colours together would make the job more expensive because they would have to use four process plates as well as spot colour plates.

Another reason to use spot colours is that you can get more speciality inks such as metallic and fluorescent colours. 

You can also get an exclusive colour for a big brand such as Sainsbury's for consistency. If it was produced in CMYK, it could get changed slightly with the percentages, but if a spot colour is used then the colour will always be the same.

There is a reference code on the Pantone reference swatches, and when it goes to print the printer knows exactly what colour to mix onto the stock to produce the exact colour. 

In Illustrator you can find the swatches for Pantone in the swatch options.

You can choose any of the Pantone swatches and turn the format into a list. You can also search for the code that you want. When you click on one it adds to your swatch library. In the cut corner there is a spot so you know that it is a spot colour.

You can also make tints of a spot colour, and this would be significantly cheaper to print tints of one spot colour than one process colour.