Everybody knows that creative productivity and efficiency is a huge interest of mine. As a consultant, it’s my specialty–helping creative and publishing workflows eliminate repetitive tasks and inefficient methodologies so they can spend more time being creative and thinking about creativity than thinking about their software and tools. The following tip is one of my favorites because, simple and short as it is, I’ve seen it make a huge difference in the amount of time and manual labor of many creatives–particularly those working on large campaigns or in corporate design departments.
On the Swatches palette flyout menu is the option to Load Swatches. From where can you load them? Any other InDesign document or the Creative Suite 2 Adobe Swatch Exchange file format (.ASE). So, while working on the second InDesign layout for a client, you can import all the swatches you created for the first layout. This is a big time saver over recreating swatches manually, which is regrettably the most common method employed. However, the main point of this tip is to explain how to save even more time and effort.
Do you often use the same group of colors? Maybe you have your company’s signature colors. Maybe you’re working on a multi-document campaign using your client’s corporate colors. Maybe you never use InDesign’s default color swatches. Maybe you just like having your own special mix of rich black always on hand. If, for any reason, InDesign’s default swatches palette does not increase your productivity, change it–permanently.
- Open InDesign and ensure that all documents are closed. Swatches are document-level options, meaning they get saved inside documents, so it’s important that there not be any documents opened, even minimized.
- Now, delete from the Swatches palette any colors you never use. Note that any in brackets–None, Black, Paper, and Registration–are “magic” swatches and cannot be deleted.
- Gotten rid of everything you don’t need? Excellent! Now, add everything you do frequently need. Between the Color palette and the new swatch commands on the Swatches palette menu, set up all the process colors, tints, spots, gradients, and so forth that you use at least a couple of times per week. If your frequently used swatches already exist in other InDesign documents, load them in instead of recreating them manually. From the Swatches palette flyout menu choose Load Swatches, and then navigate, one at a time, to the documents whose swatches you need.
- Start a new document. Notice how the new document comes pre-loaded with your swatches and only your swatches? All new documents you create will have the exact default swatch set you’ve just built, saving you time and effort per document that is better spent on actually designing.
If your list of frequently used colors changes in the future, just repeat the process. You’ll be surprised at how much time this saves on the average layout.
Tomorrow’s Tip o’ the Day will explain how to create color swatches in any Creative Suite 2 application and share them to all other CS2 applications.