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As we have been playing with the Stroke and Fill, our color selection has been rather limited at best. You will notice these are the default colors that ship with InDesign. If I go to the flyout menu of the Swatches pane, you will see New Color Swatch, New Tint Swatch and New Gradient Swatch.

Let's choose New Color Swatch and under Color mode, we can choose CMYK which allows us to play with the sliders if you like those, maybe you have got exact numbers you want to enter or if we click on that drop down menu we can choose from the various color books, the PANTONE books, TOYO books, TRUMATCH books and then from there you can choose a color and hit Add and now it will add that to your Swatches pane.

So you can create it from scratch or pull from the books. This is also where you would tell it whether you wanted to be Spot or Process and you can name either this Swatch with the unique name or name it with the CMYK values, if it's a CMYK swatch. If you look down here at the very bottom, you will see it says Other Library. Just like the other Adobe products if you select Other Library, you can target a different InDesign document or an Illustrator file older than Version 9 and you can pull those swatches in and make a new library from that.

Let's hit OK. You can also make swatches in the Color pane. Here you can choose the CMYK flyout, mix the color this way, get it the way you like and then in the Swatches palette you can choose the make New Swatch icon or from the flyout menu, New Color Swatch and it will pull that in automatically.

If you have bought the Creative Suite, you have got Illustrator. Let's go to Illustrator now and create a New Print Document either by going to File, New or choosing the new print document from the welcome screen. It doesn't matter what size you make it from this exercise.

Over here in the right you will see this Swatches pane and you will see there is a lot of colors in there. Go to the flyout menu, select All Unused and let's delete them and hit Yes. If there is any extra ones in there, let's delete them manually by selecting them and hitting Delete. There we go. Let's get it down to just to black and white swatches in our Swatches pane in the Illustrator.

Now we have had this options since CS2, they have Improved it in the CS3. If you go the flyout menu and go to Open Swatch Library, you will see that they have given us a lot of choices here as pre-made swatch groups. I like this when I am starting a project. Maybe I just don't know what colors I want to use, but I know that project is going to become a wild, maybe I choose Brights. Notice it pops up a Swatch pallet of just Brights.

Let's look at it again. Open Swatch Library, let's go to Art History and let's choose Impressionism and then we will get all these folders from which to choose. Let's say that I like this group right here. I can bring that into my Illustrator Swatch pallet and from the flyout menu I can say, Save Swatch Library As ASE. That ASE stands for Adobe Swatch Exchange. I am going to save that into our Project Files folder, Chapter 02 and I am going to name this New Project.ase and hit Save and it's given us a warning that Gradients, Patterns and Tints are not currently exchangeable. Let's hit OK and let's go back to InDesign.

From the flyout menu of the Swatches pane in InDesign I want you to choose Load Swatches. Navigate back to that Project Files, Chapter 02 and you will see New Project.ase, that's our Adobe Swatch Exchange file. When I hit Open you will notice that all those colors have been added to our pallet in InDesign. Those are also loadable in Photoshop. You can also create an Adobe Swatch Exchange file out of InDesign for use in Illustrator and Photoshop.

If there are certain colors in the Swatches pallet that you want to make a priority, select them and just move them to the top. I am a big fan of taking the Registration swatch and moving it all the way to the bottom to get it out of the way. I will do this on the computer for a lot of new users just to keep them from accidentally hitting Registration i

As we have been playing with the Stroke and Fill, our color selection has been rather limited at best. You will notice these are the default colors that ship with InDesign. If I go to the flyout menu of the Swatches pane, you will see New Color Swatch, New Tint... click to read more