Mini Class: Let's Create a Brand Color Palette in Adobe Illustrator!

1. Intro: Hey, my name is Kyler Parson. I'm a graphic designer Illustrator and top teacher here on Skillshare. In this mini class, we are going to explore some simple practices for using color in Adobe Illustrator. With your project being to create a custom color palette that we will work into a brand guide, that can be applied to a variety of brand assets. This is perfect for business and personal creative practices that want a consistent feel to their visual identity. Let's first talk about setting up a color palette in Adobe Illustrator. 2. Discovery: Get a more unique color palette, delete the current colors in your swatches panel and start from scratch. This allows you to explore and create something unique to you. Let's look at some ways to create your color palette. One. Create a few squares and play around with the fill colors until you're satisfied. Of course, there's a lot of subtleties to color, just play around to train your eyes to see what works and what doesn't work. Brands, it's good to choose around two to five primary brand colors. To help you refine, you can open up the color guide window and go through various color types with suggestions. You can adjust how many variations there are, the types of color relationships, and more. Two, you can search online for images with colors you like. Not to copy but to find interesting color palettes that resonate with your brand. Just copy and paste the images into your document and sample the colors using the eye dropper tool. Hold shift and click to add them to your color block, and add them to your swatches. Think of this as a starting point that you can refine later. Alternatively, with the image selected, go to object Create Mosaic. Create a five by five grid to get the average colors in the image. Then add them to your swatches panel. Three, a fun way to explore colors is using online tools such as color.adobe.com and coolers.com. You can explore premade color palettes, typing in keywords, and add them to your library. Or create your own, start with one color and randomize and lock colors until you get the palette you like. With adobe, you can save your swatches directly to your library and have instant access in Illustrator. Play around and find colors that work for you to play into your brand palette. 3. Refine: Now that we have narrowed down our color palette, let's look at some ways to modify colors in Illustrator to set up our brand colors. There are four main color modes, CMYK, RGB, HSP, and gray scale. You can easily swap between the color modes in your color panel by holding shift and clicking in the color picker. If you want to uniformly adjust the colors in the menu, hold shift and drag the color sliders. This will adjust all the sliders at once for an even change. Choose the modes that will best reflect the purposes of the final project, RGB for screen and CMYK for print. You can adjust your whole document to match this purpose when creating your document, or go to document, setting, and change the color modes. For consistent branding, it may be good to create three versions of each of your brand colors, RGB, CMYK, and Pantone. This will ensure correct colors depending on the purpose. RGB will be more vibrant, and CMYK will appear duller on screen. To check if a color will work for print, look at your swatches panel for the warning sign. This means your color is out of scope for print. Double click the swatch to automatically change it to the nerest print friendly version. Then adjust as necessary. To find the nearest pantone number, click your color. Go to dit Recolor Options, choose Color library from the dropdown menu. Panton Colors because of agreement changes with Panton, the latest version of Illustrator doesn't have the Panton Color book. But don't worry I have you covered. I have provided the ACB Adobe Color book files in the project resources. Simply go to the dropdown menu in your swatches, open the file library, swatches file, and paste the ACB file. Now you will have access to the Panton Color Book swatches. 4. Classify: When you have your color palette created, you can select all your colors and create a new color group in your swatches panel. If you select global colors, this will allow the color to update in every instance the swatches used in your document, when you apply them to brand elements, whether it be a fill, stroke, gradient, or pattern. This will make it easier for you to make adjustments if a client wants to change the colors or for yourself to revine the design without having to select and change every individual color. After you finalize your colors, you can identify colors and package them for your client. RGB uses Hex codes and a number value for each of the color 0-255. You can find this at the bottom of your swatches panel. CMYK uses percentage of each ink 0-100%. To simplify things for you and your client or others that will use the colors, it's best to round to the nearst whole number. This won't affect your colors that much, and it's a lot easier to manage and communicate. Simply make a text box under your colors and identify it with the color mode and type in the values, the Hex codes, or the pantone numbers. Now, whether you're creating a web page, printable poster, or merchandise, you will have consistent colors to help establish your brand. Check out Logo Package your Extension to save time creating the Color brand guide. Now that you created your color palette, share it in the Project panel. Don't forget to leave a review and follow me here on Skill Share for more classes. Wishing you all the best on your creative journey. I'll see you next time.