Organising swatches and libraries in Vectornation by Zaweba

A colour you use once is a choice. A colour you use across a whole project should be a swatch. In Vectornation by Zaweba swatches can be grouped, made global or spot, collected into libraries and shared with other programs through common swatch files.

Swatch groups

Swatch groups keep related colours together. A brand might have a group for its main colours, another for accents and another for greys. A packaging job might have a group per product flavour. Grouping means you find the right colour quickly and are less tempted to mix a near match by eye, which is how designs drift off brand.

Global and spot colours

A global colour is linked to everything that uses it. Change the swatch and every shape in that colour changes too. That makes it the right choice for any colour that may be adjusted later, such as a client's brand colour that is still being agreed. Spot colours are for inks mixed specially for printing, as opposed to colours built from the four process inks. They matter when a job is printed with a particular ink, such as a corporate colour or a metallic.

Swatch files

Vectornation reads and writes ASE, ACO, GPL and CSS swatch files. ASE is widely used for exchanging swatches between design programs. ACO is a common colour swatch format from photo editing. GPL is the palette format used by several free graphics programs. CSS is the format web developers work in. Between them they cover most of the ways a palette will reach you or need to leave you, whether from a brand guide, a colleague or a website's style sheet.

A handy pattern: import a client's palette at the start of a project, make the key colours global, and when the job is finished export the palette as CSS for whoever builds the website, so screen and print use the same colours.

The Libraries panel

The Libraries panel keeps colours, graphics and text styles in local files that are available in every drawing. That is where things you reuse across projects belong: your house palette, a logo you place often, a set of heading styles. Libraries can be imported and exported, so you can move them to another PC or share them with a colleague as files. They are kept locally, so nothing depends on an account or an internet connection.

Keeping colour under control

Start each project by setting up its swatches before you draw much, rather than collecting them afterwards. Name swatches meaningfully. Use global colours for anything likely to change. Keep spot colours only for inks the printer will really use, since a spot colour by mistake can create an unwanted extra plate. If the job has to match printed ink books, see the spot colour books feature, which loads your own books and snaps colours to the nearest.

Delete unused swatches before handing a file over. A tidy swatch panel tells a printer or a colleague exactly which colours the design relies on, which makes their work, and their questions, much simpler.