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Adobe Illustrator CC - Advanced Training

Using Color Themes in Adobe Illustrator CC

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hey there, so Color Themes in Illustrator is under 'Window'. If you go down to 'Color Themes' and basically all it is, it starts from 'Create', and you can jump across to 'Explore'. Depending on your internet connection it can take a little time, but Explore is the best option. 

What we're doing is, we're just looking for colors that just excite us, or get us out of our commonly used colors. I totally use the same colors. At the moment, I'm just using all gradients from Grabient. I'll move on, I promise, but, at the moment, say I need to pick some new colors for this-- this guy here, you can see, where I got these colors originally-- where is he? There, LINDO. So when I was picking these colors I just went to this, and went, "I need some different colors" and I picked them from here. 

A cool thing you can do is, say that, you decide that you pick these, Most Popular in the last month, or all time. Let's say you like this one here. You can click on it, and say, I want to add it to my Swatches. Now you can close it down, but now I can click on this, make a duplicate. And with it selected, I'm going to go into here, and go to my 'Swatches'. There's that kind of group there, so I can actually go and make a different color version. You, you… pretty exciting. I love them. It gets me out of my kind of color gloom. 

Bigger version of that is color.adobe.com, let's jump to it here. And when it loads us, you then 'Create'. Go to 'Explore’, and if you want to, it's quite nice to sign in using Adobe ID. Why would you do that? Because, say that I like this color here, it's all 80s. I can click on it, right? I can say-- actually, you, I want to click on 'Edit'. And I can go through and copy these Hexadecimal numbers over, or the RGB. Actually what I want to do is go back to 'Explore', and I want to go to this one that says 'Save'. And it says-- I'm going to stick it in my library. You might have a special library, 'Zoo', that's fine for me. And I'm going to click 'Save'. 

The cool thing about that is that now, hopefully if I go to Illustrator and I click on another version and I go to my 'Libraries', and go to 'My Library' there he is there, there's the 'Zoo'. You can actually click straight from this. I can go in here and just start clicking colors. Make sure the Fill's at the front. It's a bit hard. But say you do like these. As you use them, they'll be added to your Swatches Panel. Now you can right click them, and say 'Add to Swatches'. So, depends on whether you want to use libraries or you want to find them in here. There's that new group. Why am I showing you that? Just to get you out of your funk for colors. If anything is green and gray, like it is for me, all gradients at the moment, just a nice way to deal with colors. All right, let's get into the next Color video.