One of the lead developers of Inkscape, Jon Cruz has been advocating for better color management in the Libre Graphics projects a lot recently. According to a post on Jon’s blog today, Inkscape is going to grow its support for swatches and swatch books. If it includes strong support for spot (solid) colors these changes will definitely affect graphic designers quite a bit. Some of the efforts listed include enhancing the swatch UI including more drag and drop, including gradients in swatches, and support for swatch book swapping and sharing. The description seems to indicate that switching a swatch book/set will replace the color on all objects that used swatches. The would allow a designer to explore and present different versions of the same work without any change to the objects at all. Sweet.