Creative suit / Session 1 / Illustrator

23 / 10 / 13

DESIGN FOR PRINT / OUGD504
CREATIVE SUIT / WORKSHOP.
SESSION 1.


ILLUSTRATOR
It is important to remember to work with CMYK when designing for print.

Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key.
Key is the black ink that defines an image.

When opening a new document on to the Illustrator software, when designing for print, make sure that the colour mode is set to CMYK. Also known as the process colour and it refures to the printing process.

There are many ways to apply colour when working in illustrator.

These are situated around the page ready to be used. The top left and right hand corners of your screen and also near the bottom of the tool bar down the left hand side of the page.

Using a swatch palette also allows your to apply colour however keeps the same colour with in the collection. This can help you to ensure that the design is consistent in help remain specific to the ethos, style and balance.

To do this properly, you have to create your own colour palette. To do this, delete all of the existing swatches in the window. This will help you build information that is more helpful to you and your design process.

The registration swatch are part of you layout when printing but are not an actual part of your design. 

To make a new swatch you navigate the toolbar and lists to do so.

This allows you to alter the interjections of CMYK using the percentage sliders. This dictates how much of each colour is present with in the colour you are looking for.

Here you can see the defined colour has now been added to your swatch palette. this help you to be organised as well as efficient when designing.

If you have used a colour with in your design and you want to add this to your swatch so you can use it again in your design later, you can go to the fill box and drag that colour over to your swatch palette.

Adding through the tool box way shows the coloured swatches with a cut white corner. the difference between these is the fact that the added and are seen a global. 

The different in these swatches if the fact that the global box is ticked.

Global means that you can alter one coloured item and any other items on your design will also change. this benefits you as it allows you to make small alterations that means you do not have to click on and click off each individual item.

Using the Global swatches also means that you can alter the tint of one of your chosen colours.

Above you can see that the tinted version of the original colour is now present with in your swatch.

Having the preview option ticked means that you will be able to view the changes you make on the actual design as you play wit the colour balance tools.

CMYK are referred to as inks, however there is another way in which colour can be printed.
spot colours. Spot colours are solid colours that are not printed through other colours such as CMYK inks. 

Spot colours are there own colour which also means using them can be considerably cheaper as you are using one colour. CMYK means that you need 4 printing plates and four inks which means the cost can be a lot higher. 

Another benefit of using spot colours is that they are very consistent. This means that using them over and over again is not an issue as you are using the same 1 colour every time other than trying to balance multiple inks each time.

If you are wanting specialised inks such as florescent, metallic or pastel, these are only available as spot inks as they can not me produced through CMYK.

Spot colours and Pantone colours are all available on Illustrator.

If you find a colour you want in the pantone booklet you can then find this through the colour book tool and selecting the name of the pantone book you have.

As you can see there are thousands of colours with in just this one booklet. this is were the reference numbers come in to help you fin the specific colour.

When you type in the correct reference number into the find bar. To add the colour to your own swatch all you have to do is click on it and it adds itself.

Unfortunately for commercial printing, the printers use CMYK so if you want to print just a spot colour through a cmyk printer, your chosen pantone colour may come out differently. 

You can identify a spot colour on your colour palette it will have a spot on the white cut corner. Setting up tint swatches is also helpful and is done bay adjusting the tint of the original colour and then saving it as a new swatch.

The swatch palette become a part of that document, so when you save and close, when you come back to working on this piece your swatch palette will still be there. 

If you open up a new document the swatch palette will be the reset back to the default selection.

If you want to use this palette for another project then you have to save the palette as shown above. 

To access this on your new document you go to open a new swatch library and your saved swatch will be within the 'User defines' option.

If you want to use the same swatch for another adobe software file such as indesign you can save the swatch as a swatch exchange file.

This will allow you to share this swatch between the different adobe softwares, however the tint variations of the original colours are not accepted on these softwares.