Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

7.

Change your strokes from plain black to rich black. If you select

one of the objects in your calendar and examine the stroke color,

you’ll see that it has the CMYK values C:0, M:0, Y:0, K:100.

“So what,” you’re probably thinking, “black is black, right?”

In the RGB color space, that’s true. But not so when

working with CMYK. Black in this case is just one

ink out of the four. Much of the black printed art-

work you see is printed using rich black—a black

that is composed of all four inks. Rich blacks tend

to print darker and look, well, richer than their

one-ink counterparts. Also, using a rich black helps

prevent trapping issues—printing errors that show

white gaps between two colors that share no inks in

common. (See Figure 2-71 for an example.)

To switch all your strokes to rich black, do the following:

• Select the black swatch in the Swatches panel as a start-

ing point, and click the

icon. Change the values to C:50,

M:50, Y:50, K:100, and name the color “Rich black.” Be

sure the Global check box is turned on. Click OK to save

your swatch.

• Select any of your objects with the black arrow tool. From

the control panel, click the

next to the icon (the last

item on the control panel, called the Select Similar Options

menu). From the pop-up menu, choose Stroke Color, as

shown in Figure 2-72. Illustrator automatically selects all the

objects whose stroke color matches t