Spot Color

This project I'm doing here is more of a process of how I use spot colors in Adobe Illustrator and the applications it's used for on our Oce Arizona flatbed printer and our Colex Sharpcut cutter.  I first just want to start off with the basics of our use and then further explain later on the step by step process of our spot color projects.

The image shown above is that of some parking passes I made for a client, though the spot color does show up in this file due to how it's interpreted.

In this case, the pink color is the spot color, the "Parking Permit" part is green underneath, and the outline of the pass has been removed too so it won't potentially appear after it's been printed and cut.

Essentially the spot color asks as a fill to the void of color in our files, yet it retains its shape from Illustrator, allowing the lines to be read in other programs. In this example, the shape was made matching the outline of the pass.

After the file is made, we open it up in Thrive to print on our Arizona printer, and due to how the program reads spot data, it is able to read exactly where the cut marks would be, though when it prints it only fills in the process colors on the job, in this case the green.

The process only works however if a cut preset selection is made during the processing of the job.  We have a Colex cutter, so we use that, and upon sending the prepared file over to the queue to print, it also creates a file that can be used by our cutter.  

The final step is simply to place the printed material on our cutting bed, then open the cut file, and have the machine run along the outline provided to it.

Hope this was a bit insightful on our process of using spot color and how it helps with our work during the day, thank you for reading!