Working with color

One of the many ways to add variety and interest to a layout is to incorporate color. In InDesign, we can easily add color to any part of our layout, including objects, frames, and even text. We'll be incorporating shades of blue and green from the Midwest Pet Pals logo into the newsletter in a number of different ways.

Understanding color models

Before we start working with color, it's important to understand the concept of color models. Color models describe the different colors that you see and work with when designing a layout. There are four main color models you can work with in InDesign:

When we chose the Print preset during the process of creating the newsletter document, InDesign automatically set the color mode for the document to CMYK, since that's the color model most frequently used for print, so we'll be working with the CMYK color model today. 

Exploring the Swatches panel

There are two panels in InDesign where we can choose colors for our document: the Color panel and the Swatches panel. For today, we'll be using the Swatches panel, as we'll be using two specific colors and want to be able to easily apply them to objects.

Let's open the Swatches panel and take a look at its contents, then we'll create some color swatches to use in the newsletter.

The Swatches panel opens, and we can see it already has some swatches inside of it:

At the top of the panel, we can choose whether we're working with an object's stroke or fill, as well as switch between working with the fill/stroke for a frame and the text it contains. When working with the fill and stroke, whichever swatch is on top indicates what part of the object we're working with.

There are a total of ten swatches in the Swatches panel by default, including a couple of special swatches:

• [None], which removes the color from the fill/stroke of an object
• [Registration], which is used for printer's marks in a publication
• [Paper], which acts as the color white
• [Black], which is created from 100% black (or key) ink when printing

We also see a handful of other colors whose names indicate the different percentages of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink used to create the color when printing.

NOTE: You may need to resize the Swatches panel to see all of the swatches. To do so, Point to the bottom of the Swatches panel, then Press & Drag the bottom downwards until all swatches are visible.

An important note about the difference between the [Registration] and [Black] swatches

While [Registration] and [Black] may appear to be the same color, the two colors are handled very differently when printing. As mentioned previously, the Black color swatch is made of 100% black ink, as we can see in the tooltip when hovering our cursor over the [Black] color swatch in the Swatches panel:

However, hovering over [Registration] shows us something very different:

Its tooltip says "Prints on all plates", which means it's using all four colors of ink at 100% saturation to create this color and is printing with four times the ink typically used to print a color. Using [Registration] instead of [Black] can cause serious problems when printing a document, so you should avoid using [Registration] in your document for objects you want to print using black ink.

Creating color swatches using the Swatches panel

For the newsletter we're creating, we want to use colors that aren't currently in the Swatches panel. Thankfully, we can add new colors to the Swatches panel as needed, and even name the colors if desired. We'll be using the shades of green and blue from the Midwest Pet Pals Logo:

There are multiple ways to add colors to the swatches panel. To make things easier, we've already made note of the CMYK color values for the specific shades of blue and green for you:

• Pet Pals Blue: C=96 M=78 Y=14 K=2
• Pet Pals Green: C=39 M=0 Y=100 K=0

Let's add these colors to the Swatches panel. We'll also name these colors to make it easier for us to distinguish them from the other colors in the Swatches panel.

The contents of the Swatches panel should now look like the following image:

Applying color to a frame's stroke and fill

Adding color to elements in InDesign involves working with two different parts of the element: the stroke, which is the element's outline, and the fill, which is the area inside an element. We can change (or remove) the stroke and fill color for content frames, shapes, and even text. For example, the following circle has a red stroke and a pink fill:

The next example is of a text frame with a dark blue stroke applied to the outside, and a light blue fill color:

And this final example shows how even text can have a stroke and fill color in InDesign, as the text itself has a dark green stroke applied and a light green fill color:

Let's add some color to the sidebar article on the front page. We'll start by selecting the frame containing the main body of the sidebar article, then we'll add a stroke and fill color to the frame.

The sidebar article should look like the following image at this point:

While Pet Pals Blue works well as is for the frame's stroke, Pet Pals Green is a little too intense to be used for the fill color. We can fix this without needing to add more colors to the document, though, by adjusting the color's tint.

Adjusting a color's tint

Sometimes, we may want to use a lighter version of a color we're working with in a document. For instance, while Pet Pals Green is a little too much for the fill of the sidebar article's frame, if we had a less intense version of that color handy, it might work better for the sidebar's background color. We can easily adjust the intensity of a color by changing its tint in the Swatches panel. Let's see how this works.

The sidebar's background color is now much less intense:

However, the outline we added to the frame is hard to see when the frame is selected. We could make it a little thicker, to help separate it from its surroundings a little more.

Adjusting the thickness of an object's stroke

One last thing we can do to help make the sidebar article stand out is to adjust the weight, or thickness, of the frame's stroke. We can change the stroke weight in the Control panel — let's do that now.

At this point, the sidebar article should look like the following image:

The sidebar article now stands out more from its surroundings.