Organizing colour mode for print in Illustrator

Question

Hi,
I want to set up my document as a two-colour for print. I'm not really sure what is the correct swatch library to choose, if there is such a thing. Either way, i selected Pantone Solid Uncoated as my swatch library. I chose two colours from this and applied them to all aspects of my document. However, the document colour mode is still set to the default CMYK, and my only other choice is RGB. My question is, how do I organize my document to be 2-colour pantone print ready?
Regards,
Erin.

Answer 1

I'm not really sure what is the correct swatch library to choose, if there is such a thing.
Erin,
You don't have to use a so-called "Color Book" Swatch Library at all to define a spot color. You can set up the on-screen appearance of a color any way you want (using RGB or CMYK values) and simply define it as a Spot Color. You can also name a spot color anything you want. And you can do this in either a CMYK or RGB document.
The truth is, a spot color is nothing but grayscale values sent to a single color separation plate.
For example: Suppose you just don't find Illustrator's onscreen display a convincing rendition of Pantone Metallic 875. You can simply create a new swatch, adjust its CMYK or RGB sliders to something that does look like 875 on screen, set that Swatch to Spot, and name it "Pantone 875 Spot."
Different example: Suppose you are building a 5-color (process plus 1 spot) glossy brochure (a very common practice). The client's logotype color spec is Pantone 875 metallic. You want occurrances of the logo and the company's tag line to overprint in that ink. But you also need to simulate the logotype color in product illustrations that will occur in the brochure. You have learned from experience (read tests) that even Pantone's own recommendation for CMYK simulation of 875 does not yield a satisfying or convincing simulation in print. In this case, you might simply define the CMYK values that you consider satisfying for simulating 875 in CMYK artwork, name that Swatch "Pantone 875 Process", duplicate that Swatch, change it to Spot, and rename it "Pantone 875 Spot." When you print seps, you'll still get seps named Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, and Pantone 875 Spot.
It's all-too-easy (and all-too-frequent in this forum) to just toss out off-the-top "feature requests." It's quite another thing to actually think it through before doing so. Illustrator does not need a separate "spot color mode."
Spot color is, by definition, for print, as is CMYK. They are just elements of the same color-separation process. Spot color is quite commonly combined with CMYK process. It would be patently ridiculous to require changing a document from CMYK to Spot Color just to use spot color. Spot color swatches are used every day in CMYK documents for everything ranging from the 5-color artwork described above to varnishes and spot liquid lamination.
Even Illustrator's distinction between CMYK and RGB Document Color Modes has more to do with maintaining onscreen display of color than with any mechanical or workflow necessity. Other programs don't do that. You don't see "CMYK vs. RGB" documents in Draw, FreeHand, Canvas. In any mainstream drawing program, you can define RGB and/or CMYK and/or spot colors all day long in the same document. Users have been doing this just fine for literal decades. I have decades of project archives to proove it.
Now, something that would be both useful and genuinely innovative in vector programs (and befitting the industry's sometimes overblown focus on onscreen color calibration) is onscreen consideration of the real-world opacity of inks. Fact is, even with all of Illustrator's hair-splitting focus on color-calibration profiles, etc., etc., it (and all other programs like it) does a pathetic job of making a reasonable onscreen representation of spot inks. Understand--this is not a matter of color model "mode"; it's a matter of overcoming the effective assumption that there is only one kind of "printing" in the world, i.e., offset printing with translucent inks.
Example: Set up a process-color job that will be printed not on white paper, but on a dark substrate. The illustration is, say, a dinosaur. You, the illustrator (remember? the name of this program is "Illustrator") intend to use yellow ink as a highlight that overprints some darker green. You know this will work, because you know that the yellow spot ink you have specified is much more opaque than the translucency of ordinary CMYK offset process inks that Illustrator always assumes. Suppose that in addition to this, you intend to use an opaque white ink in the design; or a metallic. Turn on the so-called "overprint preview" feature and you'll see that Illustrator (and programs like it)--with all its painstaking focus on onscreen color calibration and gee-whiz "transparency"--is completely incapable of convincingly displaying this common scenario--used everyday on everything from T-shirts to lunch boxes. The fact is, illustration programs are used every day as workflow production tools for much broader applications than just offset printing and web pages. There's silkscreen, signage, embroidery, flexography, etc.
A spot ink is nothing more than a user-defined ink--a process separation plate other than the common four. Stating that Illustrator 'needs a Spot Color mode' is confusing spot color with line art. Spot color is as much a part of process separation as it can be part of line art. Providing the user the ability to specify the real-world opacity of the user-defined ink in the real-world printing method being targeted would be a truly useful feature.
Understand: This is not pie-in-the-sky. It can already be done (and commonly is) in Photoshop, because Photoshop correlates Channels to inks, and you can define as many additional channels as you want, and you can individually set their opacity. The onscreen display properly reflects the real-world opacity without wrecking the real-world separations.
So just think of a spot color Swatch as an additional user-defined process INK. Think of the various spot color Libraries as mere preset conveniences.
You could define a spot color Swatch named "Pantone 875" that looks purple on screen if you had some desire to do so. It would still print correctly so long as the printing house put Pantone 875 INK in the press--which is what they'll do if the separation plate says "Pantone 875"--which is what it will if you name the spot ink that way.
Also: Assuming you have the Adobe PDF virtual printer installed (which you probably do), to test your spot color separations you can simply invoke the Print dialog, select Adobe PDF as the "printer" and select Separations in the Output pane. The resulting PDF will contain one grayscale page for each INK.
JET