swatches – The Graphic Mac

Save space and never open the InDesign Swatches panel…

11/18/201112/11/2011

InDesign Swatches panel via Control panel One unfortunate fact of using Adobe InDesign is the plethora of panels that most designers have to keep open and accessible at all times in order to be productive. It doesn’t leave a lot of space to view your document.

Fortunately, InDesign CS5‘s Control panel includes a full version of the color Swatches panel, so you can save yourself some screen real estate by using it instead of keeping the Swatches panel open on the screen at all times. The bonus of using the Swatches panel this way is that it scoots out of the way automatically when you’re done applying a color swatch to a fill or stroke to your object or text. You also have access to the Swatches panel fly-out menu.

Adobe InDesign

Save screen space with Adobe InDesign’s convenient Control Panel

01/26/201103/20/2014

With more and more designers opting to use laptops for their work, screen real estate becomes more of an issue. One unfortunate side-effect of using Adobe Creative Suite applications like InDesign is the plethora of panels a designer keeps open on the screen in day-to-day work. But Adobe does make efforts to lighten the load of panels you have to keep open for convenience.

Rather than keeping the Color Swatches and Fill/Stroke Panels open all the time, you can keep them closed and use the shortcut icons in the Control Panel across the top of the screen. Hitting the “X” key switches between fill and stroke, a text entry box allows you to adjust stroke weight and style, and drop down icons offer access to your colors in the Color Swatches Panel. All of this fits in a relatively small area in the Control Panel, as seen in the screenshot at the right.

Adobe InDesign

Copy color swatches from one InDesign document to another

03/09/200903/20/2014

If you’re working on two Adobe InDesign documents and you want to pull the color swatches from one document to the other, there are two ways to do it. You could save the swatches from the first document as an .ase file from the Swatches panel flyout menu, then import them into the second document. Or, a quicker way, Command + Click to select all the swatches you want and drag them from the Swatches panel in the first document to the page of the second document. Unfortunately, the later method doesn’t work if you’re using InDesign CS4’s new tabbed window interface. You would have to drag the tab of the second document out to create a new ID window first.

Adobe Illustrator

50 Free plaid-pattern swatches for Illustrator

10/16/200803/21/2014

ColorBurned is offering 50 plaid-patterned swatches for Adobe Illustrator users, free to download. Plaid patterns can have countless uses for fashion design or textiles, graphic or web design, package design and more. What makes this set so great is that each seamless vector pattern has been converted to a swatch. Swatches are great because of the flexibility that they provide. You can perform a number of transformations on them including scale and rotate without affecting the shape of the object they are applied to. A brief tutorial on how to install swatches into Adobe Illustrator is included. Scroll down below all the preview images for the download link.

Adobe InDesign

InDesign color swatches panel shortcuts

09/12/200803/20/2014

Everyone knows you can revert to the default colors (no fill, black stroke) in Adobe InDesign color panel simply by hitting the D key. Here are a few more helpful shortcuts to file away in your mental rolodex.

D = Revert to default colors
X = Switch between fill and stroke
Shift + X = Swap the fill and stroke colors
/ = Change the fill or stroke color to [None]
J = Switches application of color formatting to frame or text

By the way, you can only use these shortcuts when you do NOT have the type tool active in a selected text frame. That’s probably obvious, but I thought I would point it out just in case.