Adobe InDesign CC - Essential Training

How do I steal colors from a logo using InDesign?

Daniel Walter Scott

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Contents

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Introduction

  1. With the selection tool, click the empty box to the right of the pizza.

  2. From the tool bar, choose the eye dropper tool by clicking and holding down the Color Theme Tool.

  3. Click the color from within the file that you want to steal.

  4. The currently selected color is now the one that you chose.

  5. Note: If this does not work you might have to ensure your ll is active. You can do this by going to Window > Color. And clicking the ll and bringing it in front of the line.

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In this video we're going to steal colors from an image, rather than knowing what the corporate colors are, because we don't know what they are, let's say we're going to go and steal them using this handy little ‘Eyedropper’, then we're going to add it to down here into our 'Swatches' panel. But before we get started, will it be the exact color from the brand guidelines, will it be perfect? No. Will it be close enough that nobody will notice? Yes.

I don't know why I don't like stealing colors, I like these, the official numbers. But, let's go and do the stealy version. You rebel, renegade, outlaw, let's go and steal colors from a logo. Where do you get the logo from? You might have got it from your websites, or you might have it sitting on your system somewhere. Go to 'File', 'Place'. 'Place' is what InDesign calls 'Import'. Find the logo, if you're playing along in this tutorial you download the exercise files, inside those exercise files, is the folder called '01 Flier'. And inside there, is 'BYOL Logo'. Click 'Choose', click once on your screen, and here's the logo we want to bring the color from.

So to make this thing work, what we need to do is, see this tool here, just click on the background, so you got nothing selected. Just click in the no man's land here, we got nothing selected. Then down the bottom here, on our tool bar, this one looks like an 'Eyedropper'. Click, and hold it for a little while. By default, yours is probably set to the 'Color Theme Tool'. I want the 'Eyedropper' tool. So you click, hold, hold, hold on the mouse and then you should be able to move over here. Still holding down, grab the 'Eyedropper' tool.

Now what we can do is, click the bottom left, the tip of the 'Eyedropper'. Click on that once. Nothing really happens, right? But over here, on my 'Colors' panel-- doesn't really matter if its got the stroke or the fill, we'll look at that in a second. Doesn't really matter, all you need to do now is, go to this little flat menu, and say 'Add to Swatches'. What's happened is, its stolen that color, there it is there. I'm moving to go back to my 'Move' tool, or my 'Selection' tool. And I can double click it. And that is-- I'll name the color value, 'BYOL Green'.

How close is it? It is not going to be absolutely 100% perfect, but its going to be pretty damn close. So, that's the way of stealing colors from a logo. Its not going to be exact though, so you might, might, okay? There's just a big asterisk saying don't come around to me if there's a problem, but I've never had a problem. Stealing colors from logos works just fine. I'm going to click 'OK'. You can see, down the bottom here is my 'BYOL Green'. I haven't added it to my library.

So, with it selected, I can click on this, and it goes over here. But, because I don't want to do this, I'm going to delete that, select it with my 'Selection' tool. Over here, I've binned it. I don't want him in here, and I don't want it in this one either, so I'm going to right click it, and go to 'Delete'. Back to happiness, where we've got official colors, and we're not doing any stealy stuff. I don't know why I have a problem with stealing colors. I think its design school. Maybe, that sort of stuff into you, so you get a bit scared about borrowing, appropriating, or stealing. So that's it for this video, let's get on to the next one.