Indesign CS4 - changing text color - please be patient!!!

[Teelowe]

I am VERY VERY VERY new to this software and graphic design altogether. I'm trying to create orange text for a flyer, but the color swatch i see only has a choice of about five primary colors - how can i change text to a color NOT one of those (a custom color, i guess...)...?

[urstwile]

Use the color palette instead of the swatch palette. You can mix colors from there until you get one that you want. Or you can try and use a Pantone swatch, by creating a New Swatch in the triangle flyout menu in the swatches palette.

[eugenetyson]

I'd recommend using the swatches panel.

On the fly out menu (on the panel there's a triangle icon with sub menus) from here click New Swatch.

You will be presented with some Options

CMYK or Spot - depends if you want the printers to use a special colour (spot) or to use up to 4 colours (cmyk) to mix the colour. This would depend if you are getting it lithographically printed or digitally printed.

With lithography you can print just black and a specail colour called a spot (usually a Pantone colour) which the printers will have to match the colour code you've picked from the Pantone - there's multiple options for Pantone the most common being Pantone to Solid (off the top of my head if it's wrong please correct me :) )

Generally most flyers will be full colour. But you can cut costs by using just 2 or colours like black, orange and blue. Which would only require 3 plates instead of 4 (CMYK).

Generally you'll want to make it CMYK (it can be changed later on) so:

Mix the colour you want to use. And save the swatch. You can now apply that swatch to many things in InDesign.

The problem with the colour panel is that the swatch isn't saved. So if you were to change the Orange to a blue it would only happen in that instance. Where as if you change the colour in the Swatches Panel you'll change all instances where you've used that swatch.

Hope that helps

[Teelowe]

thank you so much - i followed your instructions, and it worked!! (not that i EVER doubted you guys...lol!). you helped me soo much, now i have another question...
how do you resize objects...? i have tried to resize two objects and the following happened...
1 - i tried dragging the handles to make one pic larger, and the lines moved, but the pic didn't.....
2 - i tried dragging the handles to make another object smaller, but I then lost the text, etc. in the pic...

HELP>>>>:confused:

[Lithonate]

Hold down ctrl + alt + shift then drag a node to scale proportionally