Spot colour books and the Inks counter in Vectornation

Print jobs often run on a fixed set of inks. A screen printer charges by colour, a label printer may be limited to a few stations, and a brand may insist on its own mixed ink. Vectornation by Zaweba has two tools for that kind of job: spot colour books, which you load yourself, and the Inks counter, which shows how many colours a design uses.

Loading your own books

Spot colour books can be loaded from .ase, .acb, .aco or .gpl files. That covers the common ways colour books and palettes are passed around, including the book files that printers and ink makers supply. Vectornation doesn't ship any Pantone data, so you bring the books you are entitled to use, whether from your printer, an ink supplier or your own studio's standard colours.

Once a book is loaded, you can snap colours to the nearest colour in it. Pick a colour by eye, from a photograph, or from a client's website, then snap it, and it becomes the closest ink in the book. That is far faster than scrolling through hundreds of chips looking for a near match, and it keeps a design to colours the printer can actually mix.

Counting the inks

The Inks counter shows how many colours a design uses. It sounds simple, and it is, but it answers the question that matters most on many print jobs. A two-colour job that has quietly become three because of one stray shape costs more and may not fit the press. The counter catches that before the file goes out.

It is particularly useful alongside image trace. Tracing a logo or illustration can produce more colours than you meant. Snapping them to a spot book and checking the count turns a trace into artwork that is ready for a limited-ink job, which suits screen printing, vinyl cutting and simple packaging.

Where these fit in the print work

These tools arrived in version 0.10, which focused on packaging and logo work. They sit beside the other print features: swatch groups with global and spot colours, finish layers for foil and spot UV, separations preview, colour proofing, preflight and a print-ready PDF. A sensible order is to load the job's spot book first, build the design with colours snapped to it, keep an eye on the Inks counter as you go, then check separations and run preflight before export.

Getting it right

Load only the books the job really uses, so snapping can't pick a colour from the wrong book. Confirm with the printer which book and which edition they work from, because the same reference can be mixed differently between editions. Remember that a spot colour on screen is only a guide to the mixed ink; for a critical match, ask for a physical proof. And watch the Inks counter after any late changes, since pasting in a client's revised logo is a classic way to add an unplanned extra colour.

For designers who send work to screen printers, label printers and packaging plants, these two small tools save more money and back-and-forth than almost anything else in the app.