Design Practice Blog: Creative Session One

Illustrator

Colours Modes (INKS)

RGB - Additive - Screen
CMYK (Process Colour) - Subtractive - Printing inks

CMYK - 100% of each CMY we get K

Lighter colour is printed first, printed on to of each other to create different hues & tones.

Why key for black?
Because it pulls everything together & reinforces the shadow areas on the 4 colour print process.

The advanced settings with the default setting it is CMYK.

These are the colour picker options in the top right & you can chose more specific options by clicking on the top right highlight icon and show options.

Using this swatch palette you can ensure that you are apply a colour consistently. These are a default set of colours. We are going to make our own swatch palette.

These are our default swatches left. Black, white & none are all very useful. The registration is used for printing registration, crop or printers marks. This is a very special colour. The white & black have a square with the CYMK divided up this is the indication that these colours are part of the CYMK mode.

You can also change the view of the swatches as you get more useful information.

You can added swatches like this:

Leave the colour name as the CMYK percentages.
You get this by using option icon on swatches palette then going to new swatch.
Then change what you want then press ok and it will give you a new swatch.

You can also use the colour picker to do the new swatch:

You can go to options in the colour picker palette then go to create new swatch.

Finally you can use the eye dropper tool if you wanted the same colour as a placed image. Then go to the colour picker palette and the colour you have eyedropper tool will be valued within here, and then you just need to create a new swatch.

You can add colours after you have designed and then once you have a group of colours you can then create swatches.

There is a difference when they have been saved in swatches palette, there is a cut corner in the colour and also another extra box to the right hand side of the values. This means that it is global and then if you edit the swatch then every object that has been used by this colour will change to the same colour. Whereas with a local swatch you can change the swatch but it will not change the colour to all the objects. You can change this by just ticking the global box.

With a local swatch when you select it the colour palette only gives the you CMYK to change. Although the colour picker also allows you to work with tints. This can only be done by a global swatch.

Then you can chose to save these as a swatch and this is what it would look like in the swatches palette.

So now I have created a series of them and changed each the a different tint. I have not adjusted the 100% tint to a reddish colour and it changes the whole tinted objects to the same colour.

Spot colours
they are ready mixed ink, therefore CMYK doesn't have to mix it. This make the process of printing cheaper. The CYMK colour could need 4 inks and run through the printer 4 times which is obviously expensive unlike spot colours as its one ink and run through the printer once and there significantly cheaper. Although it would also create expensive print jobs, due to if you use CMKY and 2 spot colours you then are going to be using 6 inks.
Also spot colours are used to create consistency for example, Sainsbury's orange is a spot colour so therefore wherever it is printed it will be the same colour.
Finally, you can get more colours due to they are not been able to reproduce with CMYK such as metallic inks. We access these by looking at spot colour library's, which is a pantone book. And each of these has a unique reference colour.
This is system only works successfully on commercial printers not on the college printers.

How do we access these in illustrator?

For the spot colours we need to choose pantone solid coated.

So if a client has given you pantone swatch you can type into the field finder at the top. Then you need ti click on it once and it will add it too your swatch library.

You have a dot on the triangle to show it is a spot colour. And then also the square is the colour selection rather than a CMYK square. Never change the name of a spot colour, as there will be no reference number when its sent off to print. If you do tints of this colour you would only need one ink.

You can save a swatch so you can use it everytime we use illustrator by choosing a swatch to save by doing the below and then this will come up with a save as box and you save it in your swatches file within your home folder.