Elizabeth wrote:
We recently printed a piece that used a metallic silver spot on uncoated stock (specifically, PMS 877U). When building the mechanical, we realized there is no Metallic Uncoated Pantone library accessible via the swatches palette in InDesign. Why is this?
While InDesign (CS2 or CS3) does ship with a whole mess o’ libraries, including Pantone Metallic Coated, it does not come with metallic uncoated. But you know what? You can always just make your own. This is an important aspect of spot colors: You can always build your own, and as long as you give it the right name, it’ll work.
What’s the “right name”? Well, if you’re just speccing colors in InDesign, then you can call it anything you want. For example, you can call it “My happy metallic color” and when you send it to your printer, just tell them that you want that particular plate printed with PMS 877U. Because spot color inks are mixed by the printer, it really doesn’t matter what you call it, as long as you and your printer are on the same page.
If you’re using that color in other apps (such as Illustrator or Photoshop), then the “right name” is — again — whatever you want it to be, as long as you’re using exactly the same name in all your programs. If you’ve used “PMS 877U” in Illustrator, then you’d better use that same name in InDesign.
How to make the color in InDesign? In the Swatches panel flyout menu, choose New Color Swatch. Set the Color Type pop-up menu to “Spot”. In your case, I would choose Pantone Metallic Coated from the Color Mode pop-up menu, then choose 877 from the list of colors.
As you know, the problem here is that the color name shows up as 877C instead of 877U. That’s not a big deal, but if you want it to be “U”, you can now change the Color Mode pop-up menu to RGB or Lab. This allows you to change the name of the swatch. Just change “C” to “U” and click OK.
Color swatch libraries are just for convenience, like guides. If you don’t have the one you need, don’t panic. Just work around it. ;)
This article was last modified on December 18, 2021
This article was first published on November 28, 2007
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