Do I need to set AI colour profiles for use in ID?

Question

My previous set up:
Mac
CS2 (Illustrator, Photoshop, Bridge)
Quark XPress 7
My new set up:
PC (Win 7)
CS5 (Illustrator, Photoshop, Bridge, InDesign)
My problem:
I work for a company that prints newspapers, but my dept also does work for glossy sheetfed printers (magazines leaflets etc)
All my work is exclusively CMYK.
With my previous set up - I didn’t want to have to switch my colour profiles via Bridge as I was constantly juggling two types of jobs:
Our tabloid press - Profile - ISOnewspaper26v4 (CMYK)
Sheetfed Printers - Profile - ISO Coated V2 (Fogra 39) (CMYK)
So I set my CS2 Suite colour settings to  ISO Coated V2 (Fogra 39) and set an action in Photoshop to convert jpegs / eps photos to ISOnewspaper26v4.
So my CS2 working space was set for Sheetfed glossy publications and if I wanted to set a picture to the correct profile for newsprint I just had to open the picture and hit the action that applied the ISOnewspaper26v4 profile.
Regarding Quark – I set up separate templates for each type of job:
One for Profile - ISO Coated V2 (Fogra 39) and one for - Profile - ISOnewspaper26v4.
Regarding Illustrator - I found that Quark 7 didn’t differentiate between Illustrator colour profiles, or if it did, it didn’t show up in ‘Usage’.
If I went to Quark Usage and went to ‘Profiles’ it only listed the Quark profile and any Photoshop profiles, not any Illustrator profiles.
So in Illustrator I just set colour profiles to ‘do not colour manage this document’. So that I only had to worry about changing profiles for Photoshop jpegs / eps’s.
So I had a good little system going that served me well and now my company decided to move us to PC’s and CS5; and I still have the same problem – juggling newsprint jobs and glossy magazine jobs and not wanting to have to synchronise my CS suite colour settings every time I switch between jobs...
So I was hoping to stick with my little system on PC / CS5.
So basically my question is, do I need to worry about Illustrator colour profiles if I am bringing Illustrator files into InDesign? (To clarify, my Illustrator files are always pure vector, so there is no chance of some rogue RGB jpeg sneaking through on a Illustrator file)
Im open to suggestions regarding my set up, but really would prefer not to have to keep switching my colour profiles.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

First, I wasn't suggesting that your PDFs be exported to RGB, but it is a common workflow these days to keep photos in RGB until you convert them to the correct profile during the export process. This maximizes the potential for re-purposing your documents and allows you to use the same RGB photos for different output purposes without having to do separate CMYK conversions for each destination, so long as you don't need to do any tweaking after the conversion.
And to answer your question, if the .ai files have no embedded color profile they will ALWAYS be considered to use whatever the CMYK working space is in your ID file, so the numbers will be preserved. This means that there will be slight differences in color on output on different devices (the whole point of color management, after all, is to preserve the appearance of colors by altering the numbers for the output device).
Does the vector work you get from Thinstock come with an embedded profile? Is there any color that is critical for matching, such as a corporate color (which should be spot, but that's a different discussion), or do you use the same art in both the newspaper and magazine, and does the client expect a match (which we know isn't going to happen anyway)?
If there's no embedded profile when you start, there's no way to know what the color was supposed to look like, so color management is not possible, really. You can assign a profile, but you'd be guessing. Since the correct appearance at that point is unknown continuing with out color management shouldn't present a problem. The only case where you would need to manage the vector art would be if the color APPEARANCE is critical or you need it to match across different outputs, and in that case you would need to assign a profile and allow ID to preserve the profile on import and remap the numbers, which means you would likely get rich blacks someplace. Since it's unlikely that you can get a good match going from glossy to newsprint, I probably wouldn't even try -- you wouldn't want, for example, to tag the art as newsprint, and have it print subdued on the gloss if it would look better or more correct with the other profile. Color management would be much more useful if you were going from sheetfed to web on the same stock.