Are you designing a brand or a collection of images and struggling to create a cohesive color palette? In this Adobe Illustrator tutorial, we’ll be explaining how to create an automated color palette and then access it for future designs.
Why You Should Create a Color Palette
As a designer, creative, or simply someone expressing an artistic hobby, you’re likely aware that colors are one of the most important things when creating art and design work. While some people like to be more expressive with their palette with absurd and unplanned color choices, being intentional with your palette is important, too.
If you’re designing for a brand, your color palette may be the difference between attracting the right clients for your intended audience. So picking the right color palette is critical.
Maybe you want an artistic style where people can see your work and know instantly that it’s yours. For this reason, you may choose to only work with a select few colors. You must choose the colors to begin with, and that isn’t as easy as simply plucking them out of thin air.
How to Decide Which Colors to Use
You don’t want to choose your color palette randomly. As previously mentioned, an intentional choice can make all the difference to who engages with your work. The easiest way to find colors that work together is through research and creating mood boards.
We suggest using Pinterest to help with this. You can easily search for competitors and/or artists with similar styles to your own, or be inspired by images that are completely separated from your creative venture.
As well as virtually collecting images online, we suggest taking photos out in the wild and making notes about how certain colors or styles make you feel and why you use or engage with those works.
Whether you create a digital mood board with Pinterest or create a traditional mood board of collected paper swatches and images, this will certainly be the critical beginnings of finding your chosen color scheme.
How to Create a Color Palette in Adobe Illustrator
Once you’ve created a mood board, you should get an idea of the sorts of colors you can use in your color palette. To create a color palette, you should find one main color from your mood board. This may be the most prominent color from your choices, or simply the one that works best for your brand.
In Adobe Illustrator, open your digital mood board and use the Eyedropper Tool to swatch your chosen main color. This doesn’t have to be a bold color or one that stands out from the other colors in your mood board; it can simply be the color you wish to be most prominent in your future designs or branding. You can also use the mood board simply for inspiration and open your color wheel to find a color that suits the collection of images you’ve created.
Open a new Artboard. Using the Ellipse Tool (L) or the Rectangle Tool (M), create a circle or rectangle off to one side of the Artboard in your chosen color. Then, on the other side of the Artboard, create another circle or rectangle in either the darkest or the lightest shade within your mood board. To have a wackier color palette, then go for a shade quite opposite to the hue of your first color.
After placing your two color swatches, select them both using the Selection Tool (V) while holding down Shift on your keyboard. Once selected click Object > Blend > Make.
You’ll notice that this creates a gradient from your first color to the last color. By clicking into Blend Options in the Properties panel, or clicking Object > Blend > Blend Options, you can experiment with how many steps of color there are between the first and last swatch.
At this point, you can only select the blended objects together as one. You can change the gradient as one, but you cannot currently individually select one swatch. In order to separate these from one another while retaining their individual colors, click Object > Blend > Expand. Clicking Object > Blend > Release instead will return your gradient swatches to their original two.
To release these swatches further, simply right-click and click Ungroup. Take around 4-6 of the best swatches from the selection and make those into your final color palette. By having created this palette using Illustrator’s blend mode, you ensure that all the colors cohesively blend.
If you wanted to create a color palette using two colors that don’t seem related to one another, that is still an option. The gradient blending mode allows you to find intermediate swatches that won’t look out of place with your two main choices, allowing you to create a cohesive color palette quickly.
How to Access Your Color Palette in Illustrator
Once you’ve created your final color palette in Adobe Illustrator, you’ll want to save the palette for future use. There are a few ways you can do this and your choice may depend on which programs you’ll use your color palette in later.
Adobe Color
If you’re continuing to use Adobe Creative Cloud, you can install your palette to Adobe Color, which allows you to access the palette across any other Adobe software. Simply log into Adobe Color using your Creative Cloud credentials in order to save your palette in all Adobe programs.
Once you’ve opened Adobe Color, click Create > Custom. Once on the custom setting, you can change the individual color codes for each swatch by copying the hex codes from Illustrator. Once your palette is complete, click Save.
You can then open any Adobe program, or head back to Illustrator, to view and access your saved palette. Click Window > Libraries and find the library where you previously saved your palette. Once open, right-click the chosen palette and click Add theme to swatches. Now your new palette will be in your Swatches panel, so you can easily access it for future use.
Canva
To use your color palette in a non-Adobe program such as Canva requires a similar set of steps.
If you use the free version of Canva, you will likely have to put your palette’s hex codes in every time you open Canva. Keep a saved version of your final color palette as an image so that you will always have access to be able to eyedrop the hex codes.
If you use Canva Pro, you can save the color palette under the Brand Kit in your Canva account. This means you only have to input the hex codes once, and they will always be available each time you log into your account.
You Can Now Create an Auto-Populated Color Palette
This new skill will save you time and frustration and ensure that any colors you use in your palette harmonize with one another.
By creating the palette in Adobe Illustrator, you will have easy access across the Adobe Suite, and your color palette can easily be imported into other creative software.
Your workflow will seem so much smoother now you don’t have to spend time thinking up a cohesive color palette for every project.
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