Exploring the Kuler Panel in Illustrator CC

Hello there, and welcome back to another installment of Creative Quick Tips. My name is Justin Seeley, and this week, I've got an Adobe Kuler tip for you. This time around, I'm going to be talking about how to take a theme that you find on kuler.com and add it to your Adobe ID, which you can then load up inside of Adobe Illustrator and use those colors without ever having to even download the color theme as a .ase file. It's really quick and really easy. So let's check this out. I'm here on Kuler's website, and I'm going to go to the Explore tab. And again, you have to be signed in to your Adobe ID in order for this to work.

And remember, that has to be the same Adobe ID as you're using for your CC, your Creative Cloud, applications. So what I'm going to do is just find a color theme that I like. For instance this Granny Smith theme right here. What I'm going to do is just favorite that theme. Just by favoriting that theme I can then jump over in into Illustrator and inside of Illustrator I'm going to bring out what's called the Kuler panel. This is new in illustrator CC by the way. And you can get to that by going to the Window menu and choosing Kuler, or it should be there by default if you haven't changed the default work space. What you're going to do now is just simply refresh this.

And there you can see, Granny Smith Apple is right there. So now, as I start to draw shapes, I can start applying all of the different colors that are associated with that color theme directly from the Kuler panel. Now, what should be noted here is that as you select these, they do not get added to the Swatches panel, and when you drag and drop them from the Kuler panel to the Swatches panel, nothing happens. So in order to actually put these into your Swatches panel, or save them as a Swatch Group, what you're going to have to do is click on each one individually, and then you can drag and drop from there over into your swatches panel, like so.

There you go, how to quickly and easily get your Kuler colors into Adobe Illustrator using the all new Kuler panel inside of Illustrator.