All that will do is give the press guy an extra plate - which is a complete waste of time and money.

In printing the colours are separated to CMYK plates, this is known as process printing.

For colours that fall outside the CMYK gamut (colour range as only so many colours can be achieved by mixing these 4 inks) there are Spot colours, which produce an extra plate, so you'd end up with CMYK + 1 Spot plates.

There is no need for choosing Spot here.

If you're using a new black colour and changing that to a Spot - then you'l end up with 2 Black plates for printing - which is unnecessary.

You don't even need to make a new Swatch - just choose 95% Black for the colour of things if that is what you want.

If you don't understand this I suggest you talk to your printers and the press guy about the best way to setup your swatches for the print run.

For the record - 95% Black is NOT rich black. Rich Black is a combination of a Cyan or Magenta or Yellow with 100% Black - e.g., 50% Cyan and 100% Black.

And this does not need to be a Spot Colour - if you make it a Spot Colour then the press will have to mix an ink with 50% Cyan and 100% Black - produce an extra plate, run an extra plate - and all this costs money. Where it's completely unnecessary. As they are already using CMYK plates - so you can produce the Rich Black using the CMYK plates.

Again, if you don't understand this then I highly suggest you talk to your printers, go visit them and get a clearer picture of how the prinitng process works.

Your answer makes me think you really don't understand process and spot colors.

First black is most certainly a color, but more importantly it is, in fact, already always on its own plate, just as Cyan, Magenta and Yellow inkls also have their own plates when building a process color.

Process inks (the regular CMYand K) are translucent and when mixed on the paper blend together to fool your eye into seeing thousands of other colors, but you cannot mix them together in a pot to make a single color to run on a separate plate. Spot color inks are opaque, and are a lot like paint. They get mixed from a set of basic color pigments and are laid down on a single plate. If you pick a page at random from a Pantone Formula Guide swatch book (the kind with 7 swatches on a page and the ink mix formula listed), you'll probably see that the center swatch is the baseline color, and the ones above it have white added, while the ones below have black added to the mix.

As has already been mentioned, Rich Black, at least using the tradtional meaning of a mix of Black and some amounts of CM and Y, is not a spot color, and you would not typically use it for type. There ARE spot black inks, but you are much more likely to want to use a spot ink for gray type or for some other color like red or green, especailly if the color does not have a good process equivalent. Light colors, especially, will print crisper as spots than as simulations, too, because they will be laid down solid instead of as screened dots.

There are cases where it makes sense to have TWO black plates. One of them is with documents that will be translated into multiple languages. In that case a second black plate can be defined as a spot color and all of the text will be assigned to that color. This allow the creation of 1 set of CMYK plates for the illustrative content, and the changing of the spot plate to change languages. This can reduce the setup time during language changeovers since the registration for text is not as critical in most cases and the CMYK plates will already have been registered on the first run. There is no advantage, though, to adding a fifth plate for black if there will not be a change in mid-run.