Tracking pages that use color/inks?

Question

For those of you who produce projects in InDesign where some pages have color (or spot inks) available and others don't, what methods do you use to keep track?
Anything clever?
Generally speaking, for our tabloid newspaper that's imposed 4-up, we just track it on paper and hope that nobody screws up, and don't make any attempt to track it in InDesign. (For instance, a 16-page paper will probably have CMYK on pp. 1,8,9, and 16. And maybe also on pp. 3, 6, 11, 14.)
I don't expect InDesign to do the math for me, but once we've decided, I wonder if we should try harder to track it. For instance, we could color pages in the pages panel, but that's fairly subtle. We could add some non-printing markers on the page and/or pasteboard, such as a big colored rectangle behind the entire page. We could do any of the above on master pages and have seperate master pages for the color pages.
(Having seperate master pages for the colored pages seems like a good idea. It's not something we do right now, I guess, because there is no substantive difference in the recurring elements on pages that have color.)
What do you do? Either in books or newspapers or other forms of print?
What works and what doesn't work?
What do you wish you could do?
I worry that anything I've thought of so far is either too visible or too in-visible. Hmm, maybe a subtle transparency-like grid?

Answer 1

Hmm, I didn't mean to anchor this question too firmly in newspaper-space. What drove the query was production of an 8x10 32-page magazine. Like Peter, we don't have too much trouble keeping track when its the newspaper, or perhaps it's because we have workflows that are well-adapted to figuring it out early. When we have fewer design constraints, suddenly it becomes more important.
Peter wrote:
For a book I did recently that was printed digital I ended up making a preflight profile that doesn't allow CMY or spot plates. It throws a warning with a link to a location, so I can just go through the list and make sure that I really intended to have a color page.
Hmm. I guess checking after-the-fact is one way to go. I feel like we do a reasonable job with that, but I think we're 100% on catching any such screwups at the final proofing stage, it's just that we'd love to catch them earlier and have an easier way to tell in advance. Especially when our FPO photos tend to be color, which means b/w layouts will look color initially, so confusion is easy.
Uwe:
I notice you've provided a theoretical answer; while that's interesting, I would like to hear more about what you actually do.
If working with single side pages one could imagine a script that constantly checks the layout window(s) for specific page names and would apply a greyscale color profile to "View/Proof setup/custom…" if on specified greyscale pages and a CMYK color profile if on specified color pages.
I'm under the impression that greyscale color profiles don't work in InDesign.  Do you have a workaround for that?
That's an interesting way to go. I don't normally work in Proof Colors mode I wonder if there's a performance penalty.
And yeah, lack of facing pages support seems a definite problem...
For facing pages we need a marker element that indicates "color page" or "greyscale page".
It should be an object dependent on a specific page name and not part of a specific page or its content  (to be idependent when shifting pages around). I see no concept in InDesign to achieve this automatically in a constant way.
I'm not too worried about how to have the page adornment be automatically implemented; I'm more interested in what kinds of page adornments people use and might be effective. At the end of my question, I suggested "Hmm, maybe a subtle transparency-like grid?" and I did run with that a little bit last night:
I figured that a square grid too strongly screamed TRANSPARENCY so I'd try a hexagon grid. Unfortunately I don't think there's a great way to 2-color a grid of hexagons, and my first shading attempt doesn't work too well at the 10% opacity that is at. Still, I think it might be a workable way to go. But it might be too distracting. Not sure...
Maybe a startup script that interacts when page names are changing or pages are shifted around is doable.
I don't think it's too tough for a script in the idle loop to notice when pages are changing and to, say, change which master page is applied or pop up a dialog noting that. But I think I'm more interested in the UI for the designer once the pages are set, rather than the interface for changing the adornments. Because if I can't come up with a useful adornment, the rest doesn't matter.