Working with swatches and unnamed colors

You must create spot colors as named swatches stored in the Swatches palette, so that you and your prepress service provider can uniquely identify each resulting spot color printing plate. In comparison, printing any process color requires no more than four inks, so you can use process colors either as swatches or as unnamed colors.

Swatches

A swatch appears in the Swatches palette with a name you specify, making a color, gradient, pattern, or tint easy to locate and edit.

Note: Although colors from swatch libraries are named, they aren't saved as named swatches in your document unless you add them to the Swatches palette before you apply them to objects.

Unnamed colors

You can create colors faster when you don't have to name them. However, unnamed colors are more difficult to edit later because they do not appear on the Swatches palette. When many objects use unnamed colors, document colors can be difficult to maintain because you must locate and select each individual object to edit its color.

You can create a swatch from any unnamed color. See Adding, duplicating, and deleting swatches.