It’s also simpler and more powerful than a lot of our go-to online color scheme tools. This is a simply outstanding system for experimenting with different color schemes. You can also choose to edit the color scheme as a whole in one step or drill down and swap out individual colors. You can use either the “Edit” or “Assign” views to re-color your artwork.
To begin, activate the “Color Guide” palette by going to Window>Color Guide.
For instance, if you’re building a website and want this color in the header, you’ll need some colors that look good with it to round out your design. Let’s say you find a color that you like, I chose a color somewhere in the neighborhood of #8959A5, and you want to use it as the jumping off point for your color palette. However, there are some newer color tools that are really easy to overlook that can dramatically simplify the process of building awesome color schemes and possibly even save you a trip to the browser. It’s pretty intuitive, works a lot like Photoshop and has been an part of Illustrator for most of my life. Odds are, you already knew how all that stuff worked. Sometimes Illustrator will unexpectedly throw you into grayscale if you perform a certain action like applying a gradient, just follow this tip to get back to RGB or CMYK. You can also switch between color modes by shift-clicking on the color spectrum at the bottom. Any shape you create will take on both the fill and stroke color that you have selected. The UI make look similar but the difference is very important. The color system in Illustrator is similar to that in Photoshop, but definitely not the same.įor starters, instead of foreground and background colors, you have fill and stroke colors. Working with Colors in Aiīefore we get into some of the more advanced features, you should make sure that you understand the basics. Let’s take a look at what it has to offer. One of my favorite apps for this task is Adobe Illustrator, which has received some awesome upgrades in the area of color palettes in the last few versions. Interestingly enough though, the Adobe Creative Suite has some really powerful tools built right in. There are even some really stellar dedicated native apps like ColorSchemer that give you this functionality outside of the browser.
On design blogs, the utilities that get focused on a lot are usually free web tools that help you build great color palettes from your browser. Needless to say, you don’t want to screw it up. It’s an incredibly important aspect of your designs that has the power to shape the entire personality of whatever you’re creating. We’ve given a lot of time and discussion to building color palettes. See More Color Tools: No Need to Look Far and Wide Web Templates Landing Pages & Email Presentation Templates PowerPoint & Keynote Fonts Sans Serif, Script & More