The Mystery of the Empty Swatches Panel Contest Answer and Winner

Mike Rankin

It’s time to reveal the solution—and the winner—for this month’s InDesignSecrets contest! 

Here’s the scenario: 

You’re making a flyer for a new local coffee shop. You create a new InDesign document with Print intent. Then the first thing you do in the file is create a coffee-colored gradient swatch to apply to page elements as you work.

OK, technically, it’s tea-colored gradient.

You choose the perfect mix of inks, position the gradient stops at exactly the right place, name your gradient, and click OK.

And suddenly all your other color swatches have disappeared, even the default ones like Paper, Registration, and Black. The Swatches panel only shows your new gradient and [None].

Why did the other swatches disappear?

The answer is that before the new gradient swatch was created, the Swatches panel had been set to show only solid color swatches. There was a subtle clue in the first screenshot at the bottom of the Swatches panel.

When this is the case and you create a gradient swatch, the panel automatically switches to show only gradient swatches.

This causes all the other swatches (including some of the defaults) to be hidden. And since there were no other gradient swatches in the document, the panel only shows the new swatch. To restore the panel display to show all swatches, you can select that option from the panel menu or the pop-up menu.

And the winner of this contest is…

Chad Beery

Chad wins full access for 3 months to the video archives for PePCon 2016 or the CreativePro Conference (up to $495 value!).

Thanks to everyone who entered, and be on the lookout for another contest with a new great prize next month!