The InDesign Colour Swatch dialog box asking you whether you want to use a process colour or a spot colour. Well, do you?

You’re putting together a gorgeous InDesign print layout. You want a hot pink, verdant greens, muted browns. You’re a doggone design genius!

You go to the Swatches panel (of course you use Swatches to create colours – you’re not a barbarian), you ask it to create you a new colour and the New Colour Swatch dialog comes up: whaddya want? Process or Spot?

A process colour is one made out of mixing together colours to create new colours. If you’re taking an InDesign doc to print and you’re using process colours, then you’re going to be using Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black inks (know as CMYK) to make up the colours on your page.

CMYK Colours

Process CMYK is how the colours in most standard colour print jobs are defined and for most purposes they’re what you need. If you send a print job out to a commercial printer one of the things that’ll happen to your layout is that it’ll be separated into the plates (one each for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black) and these plates will be used to print your work. The creation of each plate is going to cost something, probably money.

Like I say above, CMYK is probably what you need for most print jobs but you should be aware that it’s only capable of printing a limited range of colours. You want to produce dayglo yellows or metallic effects then you’re up designers creek without a magic marker, CMYK just can’t do those things… Which is where spot colours come in…

Spot Colours

Because of CMYK’s limited range of colours (called its gamut), sometimes a designer needs to define colours that are outside this range and can’t be reproduced using Cyan, Magenta Yellow and Black pigments. This is when a Spot colour’s needed.

If you define a colour as a Spot when you print your layout a plate will be created for that colour.

As noted above, the creation of plates effects the cost of your print job but, if you want an unusually bright colour or a bronze, or a flourescent , then you’ll have no other way to go – you’ll need to define it as a Spot and have the printers separate it to it’s own specific plate and get billed accordingly.

This is mostly a good thing, but it’s not obvious enough to new users who just want to get on with creating colours and end up creating a load of expensive spot separations. Watch out! Only define Spot colours for print jobs when you know you’re expecting the extra cost.

Process and Spots on the InDesign Swatches panel

The circled swatch, unlike the others, has a circle in one of the squares to the right of it's name. This lets you know you've created a spot colour and that it could cost ya!

InDesign makes it fairly clear when you’ve defined colours as spot colours.

Take a look at the screenshot: on the Swatches panel InDesign places a small icon along with other info about the colour.

It’s easy enough to change a swatch from a spot colour to a process colour. Just right click on the swatch (or CTRL click, you single button mac folk) and you’ll get a contextual menu with Swatch Options.. on it. Choose Swatch Options… and you’ll be able to change the swatches colour type.