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All colors used in your design should be a spot color and be designated as such.
The artwork should not contain process black or any other process color. All colors should be listed as the color that is to be used. Please use Pantone® colors.
All fonts used in your design should be converted to curves (Corel Draw®) or outlines (Illustrator®).
This allows you to use fonts from any commercial font manufacturer. Your fonts do not travel with your file and will default when opened in our system. To avoid delays and possible errors please convert all text to curves before sending files to us.
Onto the questions!
I have Illustrator CS2...
1. How do I set the colors to Pantone?
2. What do they mean by spot?
3. What is process color?
4. How do I convert text to outlines?
EDIT: 1 additional question...
Your Design should be in vector format.
All of the artwork contained in these files should be in vector format. Files that contain placed images, such as bitmaps or other linked formats, will only be used as guides from which the artwork will be re-drawn. Creative Service charges may be incurred.
5. Is artwork created in Illustrator automatically vector? Or is this something that needs to be done at the end?
Thank you all!
Last edited by guest5779; April 29th, 2007 at 09:19 PM.
1. To set Pantone colors go to the Swatches palette on the right in Illustrator. Click on the little black arrow in the circle in the top right corner of the palette and click Open Swatch Library. From there you can choose from one of the Pantone libraries, I would go for Pantone solid coated. Now click an object in your design and click on the desired Pantone swatch, set.
4. Select the text you want to outline then press Shift+Ctrl+O, outlined.
5. Yes, created artwork in Illustrator is by default vector format. But on the end you can choose to rasterize your artwork so it becomes raster format, like a picture. Depending on your situation you may want to let your local printer do that for you, as some of them work with different raster settings.
1. So Pantone Colors (solid) are considered spot colors then?
2. Say I have to take an image created in Photoshop and move it over to Illustrator, how do I convert this to a vector image?
3. So if CMYK is process color, do I want to select an RGB image for my template? Is there any other options that should be selected when setting up my canvas?
Any other helpful hints are welcome! Thanks again!
2. In Illy look at the top nav bar and click File > Place and place your picture. Now you can Live Trace the pic. Play around with all the options untill you get the desired result.
3. RGB is mostly fine... but ask your local printer for this to make sure
just two more cents: i suggest checking the pantone colors you pick against a hard copy swatchbook so that you have a better idea of what you are getting. depending on your monitor and various other factors, the colors you see on screen won't necessarily be the colors you have spec'd in the file.
just two more cents: i suggest checking the pantone colors you pick against a hard copy swatchbook so that you have a better idea of what you are getting. depending on your monitor and various other factors, the colors you see on screen won't necessarily be the colors you have spec'd in the file.
Absolutely true, forgot to mention that
Sorry to hear your print job went wrong scpromos, but we all have to learn from our mistakes. Making mistakes are the best lessons in life, as long as you learn from them
Keep in mind that just because you bring a picture in illustrator and convert it to vector doesnt necessarily mean that it is true vector format. Vector format has different properties than a jpeg, gif, bmp etc. I just remade a logo for a local bodyshop because all he had was a picture of it and nothing else. With vector graphics you can enlarge the graphic to an almost infinate size without losing any quality. You try to do that with a raster file (jpeg) it will turn out looking like a bunch of big squares . . . . . . .
Sorry to hear your print job went wrong scpromos, but we all have to learn from our mistakes. Making mistakes are the best lessons in life, as long as you learn from them
It was a good lesson, luckily it was a personal job for me and not a client.
Patone Colors / Spot Colors... Uh? 
