Color Posts

Look closely and you’ll find some new options for working with panels.

Here in the great American Northwest, I’m still trying to get ready for Autumn, 2008, but apparently other folks are looking ahead. If you’re trying to prepare documents for Spring, 2009, you’ll be happy to note that Pantone has already announced the official colors of that season, including Super Lemon and Dark Citron (named, we [...]

Blends are one of InDesign’s least intuitive features, but they’re not hard to control once you’ve used the Gradient tool

Are you feeling limited or even trapped by the measly 1,000 or so spot colors available in the Pantone spot color libraries? Good news: Pantone has recently introduced a brand new spot color system, the Pantone Goe system. The Goe system adds 2,058 new colors for the color starved designer. The original Pantone Matching System [...]

How to make two or more documents share the same styles, master pages, and more.

Tim Cole is not just good, he’s good for you, too. Case in point: the Senior InDesign evangelist
wrote up a wonderful little transparency trick on his Backchannel blog, showing how you can put an image inside editable text, or even make text fully transparent while an effect (such as a drop shadow) remains visible…

Just when you get a comfort level with InDesign, because it works so well, something jumps out and surprises you. Case in point: Switching color swatches.

The project I was working on that brought this problem to light was a template that is built using a swatch palette of about 16 colors, all in the orange [...]

Our friend Carlie wrote us with a problem that was so perplexing (and the solution so vexing and unpleasant) that I must share it with you. She wondered why a placed PDF file — a CMYK image created in Illustrator — was changing its CMYK values upon output. After all, she was using Preserve Numbers [...]

When you fill an object or text with the default [Black] swatch at 100% opacity, it overprints any color behind it. Objects using any other swatch or any other percentage of [Black] automatically knock out (create a hole in) background colors when the file is output to color separations for printing.

To force objects that would [...]

Jim wrote:

This is a common cry from InDesign users… “all the images suddenly changed! What happened?” You identified the cause perfectly: You added a transparency effect. When you add any kind of transparency effect — including placing an image that has tranparency in it, or using any of the features in the Effects panel — the whole spread may change because InDesign forces the display…