The other day I had a client inquire as to how to make a proper representation of a color that you can’t find in any color book.  We’ve all been there.  You’re getting your files ready to send to the press, and during pre-flight you remember that there is a Spot-UV or a Spot-Glitter area on the design.  You start to have a mini heart attack as to how to identify such a custom color so the printer cannot screw it up. (Oh, they will.)

In Adobe Illustrator there are only two color types.  Spot and Process.  Making a custom process color is easy, but you don’t want your printer cranking out 4 extra plates and charging you hundreds of dollars for one little mistake.

While I’m at it, I’ll insert the following:

Press Check! PRESS CHECK! PRESS CHECK!

Ahem… moving on.  So, if you can’t use a process color to represent your spot varnish or custom color, then what?  PMS Color?  Yeah right!  The last thing we want is for our printer to actually order PMS1794 and print with it because that’s when the phone calls start.

So what can we do?  Enter the custom spot color.  You read right, CUSTOM SPOT, and it’s easy as pie.

As an example let’s take a look at a standard folder design.  As indicated we are wanting to put a spot varnish on the bottom right.

Although it looks nice, we should change it, so the printer doesn’t think we’re wanting a screen of the background.

Step 1

Create a process color of your choosing.  I usually pick a very bright/neon green or hot pink so it really sticks out.

Step 2

Open up your swatches pallet and in the side menu click New Swatch…

Step 3

Then the new swatch dialogue will pop up and behold, it already has the color you picked in it.  Change the swatch name to whatever you like (I called mine Spot Varnish).  Then change the color type to spot color and hit OK.

Step 4

Double check that the newly created swatch has the little white triange with the dot in it as shown.  That indicates it is a spot color.

Then, on your document select the area that you want to dedicate to varnish, and while selected, click on the newly created spot color in your swatches pallet and that’s it!  It may look bright green on your screen, but when your printer sends it through his RIP server, it will dedicate only 1 plate to the varnish area!

It’s a prime example of the adage “what you see isn’t always what you get”.  The applications of this can also be used on T-shirts and other silkscreening jobs too!  Remember that if you are printing on a dark T-shirt, you’ll need a flood coat of white first, and making a custom spot color just for that plate puts more control in your hands and less in the printers.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 1:31 pm and is filed under News Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.