OUGD504: Creative suite session.

OUGD504
Creative suite session 1. 

Illustrator. 

Can work with both CMYK and RGB on screen. 
CMYK Inks are generally transparent.
With various tints of these inks you can produce most of the colours you need with these inks.
Black is the key colour as it is used to reinforce dark areas, therefore producing 100% black. 

You can specify a default colour mode when creating a document. RGB mode is good when creating work for the web. 

When using colour in illustrator, the best way to use colour is through the swatch pallete.

Using the swatch palette to apply colour means that the colour created can be consistently used and applied to a number of objects in illustrator. The swatches allow us to create specific colour palettes.

We can simplify our swatch palette and add the colours that we need to use.

To remove all the unused colours...

Your swatch palette only needs the 4 colours below, plus your own bespoke swatch colours.

We can change the swatch palette to be displayed more usefully. 

We can make new swatches using the swatch palette menu.  

CMYK are also known as process colour, CYMK are the inks used during the printing process.

My colour swatch:

You can edit your swatch by double clicking on it.

You can put colours into your colour palette by clicking on the object and dragging the colour from the left side bar to the colour palette.

You can add all 5 of the colours you have used by selecting in the menu, add all used colours. All colours used for the artwork will appear in the colour pallet.

These swatches/ the palette we make is specific to the document we are working on. 

When a swatchhas a cut corner it means it is a global colour swatch. This means you can edit the swatch in real time, by checking the preview button. 

Global swatches dont give you CMYK percentanges, It gives you tint percentages. If we want to edit the ink mixture we have to double click on a global swatch. 

New swatch with 51% tint. 

You are not able to create tints of a non global colour. 

When creating tints of the same colour, when going back to change the original colour mixture, if clicking preview, working in real time, we can change the original mixture on all of the shapes making a global colour change. 

Part 2

Spot Colours.

A colour that is not printed using a composition of CMYK. It is a colour that is printed with its own ink. 

Using spot colours can make a print job significantly cheaper as you are using one ink. 

In order to print a purple, you may not be able to mix this without using 3 colours. 

Therefore you will need more plates, initiating a higher cost. 

Another benefit of using spot colours is they are very consistent, using them again and again is therefore not an issue as you are using the same one over and over again. 

Metallic and fluorescent inks are availible as spot colours and not in CMYK. 

Solid inks - not made from CMYK, different cook for different paper stock, coated, uncoated etc. 

We can look at these colour books in illustrator. 

Pantone solid uncoated.

Small list and show find field, type in reference number you want and find the swatch that you need. 

We cannot use this straight from the library, so we have to add them to our swatch palette, we do this just by double clicking on the colour. 

This colour reference system only works in commercial print, printing on the inkjet/ laser printers are from CMYK. Therefore if printed via this direction there may be some colour shifts. 

When we look at our spot colours they are displayed differently. Firstly by its name, never change the name of the spot colour, as it is the only way the printer knows what colour to mix. There again is a cut corner, as all pantones are global colours, in this cut corner there is a spot identifying it as a spot colour, The grey square with circle in the middle again identifies it as a spot colour. 

How do we save this to make it availible for other files/ programs?

Save your swatches as AI.

To access swatch palette in other pieces of adobe software, we have to choose to save the palette as an ASE, adobe swatch exchange. 

Save this file in the same project folder that you're working on for the brief.