Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Welcome to the third Printwand video lesson, “The correct use of color.” Previously,
we learned about how to embed our artwork into Illustrator. Now we’re trying to ensure
the correct use of color in our files; whether that be using Pantone (also known as PMS colors)
or a four color process made up of the inks cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Either way,
your goal should be to use one or the other and not both.
So here we are in our Illustrator file and we have our file open and we can see that
we have two seemingly identical pieces of artwork here. When we lay one on top of the
other we can see that there doesn’t seem to be any difference between the two. So let’s
head up to our “Menu Bar,” we’re going to go over to “Window” and then head down
to “Swatches.” And we can notice that this opens up “Swatches” color pallet.
Now if you notice the button in the upper right hand corner of the “Swatches” pallet,
let’s go ahead and select that and we’re going to want to move down to where it says
“Large List View” and select that. Let’s grab the bottom corner of the pallet so that
we can see a little more of the colors that we have here.
When we select each piece of our artwork, let’s notice how the color changes in the
“swatch pallet.” You can see how easy it would be for the wrong type of art to be
selected, for the wrong color to be used. Let’s double click on one of the swatches
here to see what’s going on in the swatch itself. We can see that this one here is a
PMS color. This means that it’s one color when it’s printed. It only is going to use
one ink. So let’s close this and then take a look at the next piece of art.
We’ll notice here that this one is made up of a four color process. It uses four inks.
Cyan, magenta, yellow and black. So this is just one more thing to keep in mind when we’re
setting up our documents. It’s not that one is right and one is wrong. It’s just
one more thing to be aware of with our artwork. As you can see, it can be easy for the colors
to be mistaken for each other. Whatever process that we have indicated to our printers, whether
that be PMS color or four color, that’s how our document needs to be set up.
So in conjunction with that, another habit to get into would be always trying to send
original files to our printers or those people handling our documents. In this case we’re
dealing with Illustrator; that way it makes it easier for them if they have to make changes
at some point in the process, they can just go into the document and make their changes
and they have everything they need right there. So this is going to finish our lesson on “The
correct use of color” in our Illustrator files. Up next we’re going to discuss how
to “Achieve a multi-color look while using a one color document.”
Make sure to check back often to Printwand for more video lessons as well as other articles
to help you with your marketing and promotional needs.