Any Adobe Illustrator users - need help with a swatch

1

Ive used illustrator for many years for sign making but now doing a lot more print.
BUT can I edit the default CMYK colour swatch as the black is 0 0 0 100% and I need a true black 60 40 40 100.
Ive created a new swatch and the new colour but every time I open it , it defaults back to a RGB colour.
It can’t be this difficult to create one colour in cmyk and have it appear every time I open Illustrator ??

Can it ?

2

First, make sure that your preferences are set to “Rich Black” as shown in this image. This will ensure that your artwork is always displayed and exported with the most saturated black (sometimes called “designer’s black”).

Second, you can’t change the default swatches but it shouldn’t matter if you use Rich Black. So if you’re still concerned, simply create your own colour set with black values as you want. Give it a name and you can share that colour set across all CC apps.

AI-Black
AI-Black1200×1067 140 KB

Lastly, how have you set up your colour space? “General Purpose” is the default but I use a personalised setting that works for web and print process.
You can also assign a profile to any artwork. For example, if you’re working in CMYK and want to export to web, assign a srgb space and you can see if there’s any shift in colour - particularly in reds, blues and spot colours - and adjust them to taste.

Colour-Settings
Colour-Settings1200×789 221 KB

Hope that helps :)

1 Like
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Thanks for taking the time to reply , yes very useful. I did set the Rich Black in prefs ages ago , and forgot all about that aspect tbh. So I’m presuming that overrides all blacks when saved as an eps or PDF to go to print. Thats really useful. Illustrator is a little odd around swatches, it doesn’t seem to do what is the obvious route. ! But thank you ,for your help, much appreciated. Im guessing that’s why when I make a rich black as 60 40 40 100 and then revisit it, once saved its changing to a black made by illustrator. Hence the different CMYK values from the ones I made.

4

No problem - it can be confusing but Adobe have simplified what used to be a nightmare. The FOGRA39 CMYK setting covers all digital printing presses and works really well on my Epson colour printer - I’ve never seen a discernable colour shift with those settings.

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I preferred illustrator in nineteen hundred and ninety - life was so much easier then. :) My colour swatch was old bits of telephone directories covered in paint.