From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Creating color swatches - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Creating color swatches

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- [Instructor] The swatches panel over here in the dock lists all your colors for your document. And as we saw in an earlier movie, you can use it to apply fill and stroke colors to any object or text on your page. But what if you get tired of the colors listed here? What if you want something more? Well, let's look at how you can create a new color swatch in your document. First, I'm going to make this panel taller by dragging it down at the bottom. That way I can see all my color swatches. When you want to make a new color swatch, you should probably first deselect all the objects on your page. Just click out here in some area where there's no object, so nothing is selected. Now, open the swatches panel menu in the upper right corner and choose "new color swatch." Up comes the new color swatch dialog box, and the first thing you need to decide is what color type to choose. You have two options, process or spot. Now, spot should only be used if you're going to be printing on a printing press and you know that your printer is using special Pantone inks. Those are spot inks or varnishes, things like that. Most people do not print with spot color inks, so you should probably choose process. Generally, you want your process colors to be either CMYK or RGB, or you could scroll up here and choose HSB, which is technically just another way of specking an RGB color. If your document is going to be printed, then you almost certainly want to be using CMYK swatches. But if it's mostly for onscreen viewing, maybe someone's printing to a desktop printer, then RGB or HSB color is fine. In this case, I'm going to leave it set to CMYK, and from here we can define our color. I'll change this and make these other colors and so on. I'll get this kind of purple color. Now, I do need to point out that you should be very careful when picking colors on your screen because the colors that you see on screen are probably not going to match what you see in print. Believe me, I've been burned by that one myself. It is much better to pick CMYK colors from a printed swatch book, such as a True Match or Pantone book, and then type in the values that the swatch book tells you to. But whatever you do, you want to choose a name up here at the top, something you'll remember. For example, if you turn on "name with color value," you get the CMYK values as the name. Now you have a couple more choices. First, you need to decide whether this color swatch should also be saved to a CC library. CC Libraries are cool because you can use them across not just InDesign documents, but in Photoshop and Illustrator and even some of Adobe's mobile apps. But in this case, we don't want to do that. We just want it here in this document. So I'll leave that turned off. Also, if you click "okay," it'll add that swatch to the swatches panel and close the dialogue box. So in this case, I'm just going to click "add." That adds it to the swatches panel, but keeps the dialog box open. So now we can pick another color. For example, let's get a green color like that. This time I'm going to turn off "name with color value," and I'll call it "my happy green color." You can call it anything you want, really. Great, now I'll click "okay," and you can see down here at the bottom of the swatches panel, my two new colors have been added. Okay, here's another important warning. If any object had been selected on my page when I created those color swatches, the last color I created would have been applied to that object. And that's the reason I recommend that you deselect everything on your page before you create color swatches. And now let's go ahead and apply one of these swatches to this text frame. I'll select it, come over here, make sure the fill is on top, and then click "my happy green color." Okay, now, what if you wanted to edit those colors? What if we didn't get that green just right, for example? What do you do? Well, you've got two choices. You can double click the swatch inside the swatches panel, but remember, double clicking not only edits it, but also applies that color to anything I have selected on my page. So that would be okay here, but in some situations that can be a little dangerous. So instead of double clicking, I usually like to right click on my color swatches. Then I see this little context menu, and I can choose "swatch options." This really should be called "edit color" because that's what it is. It lets you edit the color. So let's go ahead and change this to maybe something a little bit lighter. Then, when I click "okay," you can see it changed that color. And if I had used that same color in other places in the document, then it would be updated not just here, but everywhere I used it. So the swatches panel is one way to create, apply, and edit colors in InDesign. There's another way too. It's called the Colors Panel. And in the next movie, I'm going to show you how to use that and why you might or might not want to.

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