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If you have noticed, you have got a Swatch in here called Dancin' Red. If you look all way to the right, you will see a spot, that tells us this is spot color. This CMYK is only the model that it's rendering the video and the visual, but it will print as Spot ink. This is going to be a two color flayer.

Well, if you ever had to build something in two colors before; you know that you start running at the colors real fast. We have got Red and we have got Black. Well we could do a 50% Red and some other variants as a Black but we want more selection than that.

So, from the flyout menu of the Swatches pane, I am going chose New Mixed Ink Swatch. If you will notice, I can chose the Dancin' Red and Black and I can move these sliders to mixed them to create a new color using various percentages of the two colors to create a totally different color.

So maybe I want something darker than Red, so I am going to go with that 50% black or 100% red and when I add that, you will notice that; that New Mixed Ink is added. So I can choose something in my document. I will choose this box in the top right hand corner, that's red, bring the Fill to the front and now I can fill that with a darker color. Is this still going to print in two color? It's just 50% black and 100% red.

If you like that concept, let's come up with even more colors. Flyout menu and let's choose New Mixed Ink Group. Now I can choose Process Black and Dancin' Red and I can say, start with 10% process black, I want you to give me 8 repetitions of that at 10% increments. Let's start the Dancin' Red at 15%, give me 6 repetitions of that at 15%. Let's just see what happens.

Now before I hit OK, I can preview the Swatches. Let's move this up so we can see it little better. As I scroll through now you'll see I am creating an entire color pallet with various percentages of the two colors. If I hit OK, look at that. All the colors I get to choose from and this is still going to be a two color job.

So now I can fill this box with a lighter color, more of a brown if I want, mauve. You choose the colors but you will notice we have all these to choose from in our Mixed Ink Group. If the project changes at the last minute, everybody go to the Green swatch, this is the default Green that comes with InDesign, double-click on it and change the color type from Process to Spot.

Now, let's call this something clever like Green and hit OK. Now if I want this job to change from Red to Green at the last minute, I can select this box and make that Green or I can take Group 1, double-click on it and I can change this spot Red to the spot Green and when I hit OK, notice how the entire Mixed Ink Group has updated to reflect my new color.

What this allows us to do is very quickly change a two color job to two different colors without reworking all the files in it. So I have made this box Green and we are going to move that around the page here in just a second. I am going to take this text here and I am going select it and I am going to make the text of it Green. That's great, but how do I make this logo green?

Well, let's go to Window, Output, Separations Preview, let's move this out of the way a little bit so we can see our work and take the view from Off to Separations. If you notice I can turn on and off the various plates of my work. Notice as I turn On and Off, the Dancin' Red, the logo turns on and off. So it's on the spot red plate.

Well if I am not in the mood to open this spot logo to change the color or I want to use it week to week, I can go to the flyout menu of the Separation Preview and about four other places InDesign and choose the Ink Manager. When I choose the Ink Manager, you'll see down here Dancin' Red is one of the colors listed, because it's used in the document.

So I am going to select that, it's a spot color and down here under Ink Alias, I can tell InDesign put anything that is spot red on to the green plate. When I hit OK, notice that the Dance Machine and these two places changes to spot green as well. Notice that the ‘the' didn't changed, now why is that? Th

If you have noticed, you have got a Swatch in here called Dancin' Red. If you look all way to the right, you will see a spot, that tells us this is spot color. This CMYK is only the model that it's rendering the video and the visual, but it... click to read more