Tip of the Week: Creating Color Groups From Selected Items
This InDesign tip for creating color groups was sent to Tip of the Week email subscribers on July 21, 2016.
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Creating color groups is a great way to keep the colors in your InDesign Swatches panel organized. You can create color groups by selecting the swatches you want, and clicking the New Color Group button at the bottom of the Swatches panel.
But did you ever notice that in the New Color Group dialog box there is another option to create a color group from the selected items in your layout? Try it sometime!
The graphic designer who doesn’t use this feature when he/she need it should be whipped with a wet towel.
Is there a way to get Color Groups included when synchronizing a book? The “Smart Match Style Groups” feature in the Synchronization options doesn’t seem to have any effect on the Color Groups when the book is synced. The swatches WITHIN the groups get added, but the folders (and thus the organization of the groups) do not.
Steve Werner just answered my question on the Adobe forums:
“No, Smart Match Style Groups refer to Paragraph and Character Styles which can include style groups. It doesn’t refer to color swatches.
In addition to an ASE file, if you had a Creative Cloud subscription, you could use Creative Cloud Libraries to store and apply color groups.”