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About this lesson
Saving your colors in the document.
Exercise files
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Saving Your Color Palettes - Instructions.docx61.2 KB Saving Your Color Palettes - Exercise.ai
1.2 MB Saving Your Color Palettes - Exercise Solution.ai
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Quick reference
Saving Your Color Palettes
Saving your colors in the document.
When to use
When you are ready to import your color selections into Adobe Illustrator as swatches.
Instructions
- Navigate to the folder where you have saved all of your images, screenshots, and photos
- Select any of the images where you have sampled colors or any screenshots showing the colors you want to use
- Drag all of the selected images to Illustrator so that they open in individual tabs
- Select one of the images and press Command/Ctrl + X to cut it, and then press Command/Ctrl + W to close the tab and choose 'Don't Save'
- When that window closes and the next one opens, you should see your next color image
- Press Command/Ctrl + F to paste your previous color reference image into this document
- Press Command/Ctrl + A to Select All so that you will have your previous image selected along with all of the other images in the document
- Press Command/Ctrl + X to cut all of the selected images
- Press Command/Ctrl + W to close this document and once again choose 'Don't Save'
- Continue this process until you have all of your color screenshots or images in one document
- Spread the images or screenshots out so that you can see them all in the workspace, then grab the Rectangle Tool (R)
- Hold down the Shift key and create a square off to the side or somewhere easy for you to see
- Open the Swatches Panel from the right side of the interface or by going to the Window Menu and choosing 'Swatches' from the list
- Select your square shape with the Selection Tool (V) and then switch to the Eyedropper Tool (I)
- While your square is still selected, use the Eyedropper Tool to sample your first color
- Once you see the color fill in the toolbar, click on the fill color and drag and drop it into your Swatches Panel
- Continue this process for a few more colors, until you have your first 4-6 colors in the Swatches Panel
- Select the first color in the Swatches Panel, and then hold down the Shift Key and select the last color you saved so that all of the colors are selected together
- Click on the Group Folder icon at the bottom of the Layers Palette and save your swatches as Custom Palette 1and press OK
- Sample your next group of colors and then place them into a second Color Group named 'Custom Palette 2'
- Repeat the process of sampling colors and putting them into Color Groups
- Once you have finished, click on the hamburger menu at the top right corner of the Swatches Panel to reveal the dropdown menu
- From the menu, choose 'Save Swatch Library as ASE...' from the list
- Give your color swatches a name and then save them in the program application folder under Swatches
- Once you have saved your swatches you can open the Illustrator file with your logo design and then open the Swatches Panel
- Click on the hamburger menu in the top right of the Swatches Panel again, and this time choose Open Swatch Library > User Defined and you should see your Swatches listed here
- Open your custom swatches
Hints & tips
- Cutting and pasting each of the images is helpful so that we can have all of our color reference in one single file
- Saving custom swatches can also be helpful if you wanted to ensure that others are using the correct brand colors when working with your logo
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- 00:03 All right, so at this point we have a few images that we've gathered from Pinterest.
- 00:08 We have a few stock photos where we've sampled some colors directly from
- 00:12 the images.
- 00:13 And I also have a couple of palettes here that I saved from Adobe Color.
- 00:18 So what I wanna do now is take a few moments to just gather and collect some of
- 00:22 these colors so that I can save them to my swatches palette in Adobe Illustrator.
- 00:27 Now what I normally like to do on Adobe Color is just do a screen grab so
- 00:30 I can get the palettes from any of the themes that I was showing you guys.
- 00:35 And once you have a few things that you like, we're just gonna go ahead and
- 00:38 open them into Illustrator.
- 00:40 And from there, we can begin sampling these colors and
- 00:43 saving them into our swatches panel.
- 00:45 Okay, so here we have a few colors that we've sampled from this photo.
- 00:49 And the first thing that I wanna do is to grab all of these swatches.
- 00:52 I'm just gonna select them by clicking and dragging around all of them, and
- 00:56 then press Cmd and X to cut it.
- 00:57 And then I'm just going to close that file.
- 01:01 Now, I'll zoom out and just kind of move this off to the side here.
- 01:04 Then, I'm going to select all of these, and do the same thing.
- 01:07 Cmd+X to cut, and then Cmd+W to close out of the window.
- 01:10 I'll press Cmd+F to paste in front, Cmd+A to select all.
- 01:16 And then Cmd+X to cut once again, and then Cmd+W to close the tab and don't save.
- 01:21 And then once again Cmd+F to paste in front,
- 01:25 Cmd+A to select all, Cmd+X to cut, Cmd+W to close.
- 01:31 So you can see there's a bit of a pattern there as I do that quickly to just get
- 01:36 all of these color palletes into the same window here.
- 01:39 So I just wanna make sure that I have everything.
- 01:41 Looks like I do, and I think we are in pretty good shape.
- 01:44 So the next thing that I wanna do is come over here to my swatches panel, and
- 01:48 it looks like I don't have my swatches available.
- 01:50 So in order to get them, I'll come up to the Window menu and choose Swatches.
- 01:55 And here is our Swatches panel.
- 01:58 Okay, so the first thing that I'm going to do here is just pick my first color.
- 02:02 And you can see it over here we have our fill color,
- 02:04 which I'm just going to literally click and drag over into my Swatches panel.
- 02:08 And I'm going to go ahead and do this with the other colors here as well.
- 02:12 And you'll see that as I start to drop these colors in here, they'll be saved and
- 02:17 we're going to kind of group them into different folders.
- 02:20 So that way, we can keep things nice and organized,
- 02:23 it'll make it a lot easier for us.
- 02:25 So I'm going to click on the first swatch palette here, hold down the Shift key and
- 02:29 select the last one, and then come down to the bottom here and
- 02:32 click on this new color group.
- 02:35 Now we can call this Custom Palette 1.
- 02:39 Leave it set to select the switches and hit OK.
- 02:42 All right, then I'm gonna delete all of these, well, except for one.
- 02:47 And I'll make a little bit bigger, and
- 02:49 that what I'm going to do is select my first color over here.
- 02:53 I'm gonna use the eye dropper tool to select this because it's a screen shot.
- 02:56 So just by clicking on this, I'm not able to select the color,
- 02:59 so I have to sample the colors directly from the screenshot.
- 03:03 But then once I do that I can again kind of repeat the process of just dragging
- 03:07 these over into our Swatches panel.
- 03:09 All right, so I'm using the square on top to sample these colors and
- 03:14 then I'm dragging them into the Swatches panel.
- 03:18 All right, again hold down the shift key to select them all.
- 03:22 Put them into a new group, and we'll call this Custom Palette 2.
- 03:28 Okay, so we now have two group folders.
- 03:31 We've got all those colors ready.
- 03:33 And let's continue the process for a few more minutes,
- 03:36 just until we can get all of these colors saved.
- 03:39 And what this is going to allow us to do is to actually save all
- 03:43 of these swatches out so that we can load them into any document we want.
- 03:48 So we have our Adobe Illustrator file that has our logo so far.
- 03:52 And what I'm going to do is save these swatches and
- 03:55 then import them back into that file so we can begin coloring and see how it looks.
- 04:02 Custom Palette 3, and let's just go and do this last one really quick.
- 04:08 All right, sample the color, drag it, sample the color, drag it over.
- 04:16 You guys see the pattern here.
- 04:16 You kind of get in a groove after you do the first one or two of these, and
- 04:21 then it goes by a little bit faster each subsequent time, all right?
- 04:26 So at this point I can close all those, put these into a group folder,
- 04:31 and again this one will be called Custom Palette 4.
- 04:34 And there we go, we now have four group folders that we can play around with here
- 04:39 in our logo mascot designs.
- 04:41 We can sample any of these colors to apply them to the fills, to the shadows,
- 04:45 the highlights, and we can find the combination from these that work best.
- 04:49 So you can see how we're kind of narrowing these down,
- 04:52 from the references and the color schemes that we've picked out.
- 04:55 So before we go on I'm just gonna come up here to this little hamburger menu in
- 05:00 the top right corner, and what I want to do is Save Swatch Library as ASE.
- 05:05 All right, and that is a swatch file that's basically going to be looking for
- 05:12 my presets folder inside of my applications, okay?
- 05:16 So yours might not look exactly like this, but it'll basically take you to your
- 05:21 Application, Adobe Illustrator, Swatches, and then you can drop it in here.
- 05:27 We'll call this one, Mascot, Logo,
- 05:32 Color, Palettes, or Custom Palettes.
- 05:37 And you can see in here I actually already have test swatches and
- 05:41 a GoSkills Test Swatches file that was from the basic Adobe Illustrator course.
- 05:46 So let's just go ahead and see if this palette file in here with the other two.
- 05:51 Swatches containing gradients, patterns or tints are not currently exchangeable and
- 05:55 will not be visible when opening the swatch file in other applications.
- 05:58 That's fine, you can just go ahead and hit OK.
- 06:00 All right, and now all we have to do is let that save, let it do its thing, and
- 06:05 then we can close out of this file.
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