Creating a color theme

- [Instructor] Now we've drawn our logo. We're actually going to get Illustrator to help us out to build the color theme for it. Everything we've drawn so far has no fill and a black stroke so we're going to swap those things out. If we select all of these items with the selection tool, hold down shift and tap X, that transposes the fill and stroke. You can do that down at the bottom of the toolbox just here with this small curved arrow but the shortcut is much, much quicker.

So we have a base color in mind and we've got RGB values for that and so we're going to go to the color panel which in the workspace we're using at the moment should be at the top of this stack next to the properties panel. Well if you don't find it just go to the window menu because that's where all of them live in there. So go to the color panel and mine has the options showing already. If you can just see this ramp here and a few swatches above it, you can click on the flyout here and choose, show options.

But as mine's already open, then I'll continue with that. So the red value that I've got is 163. I'm going to tab through to the green value which I have at 129, and the blue value at 189. And then I'm just going to hit return and it's given me this lovely color just here. Which is excellent. What I now want to do though is mix some other colors based on them.

So first off I'll save this as a swatch so that I've got it. Go to the flyout again on the color panel. You can choose, create new swatch, and this will open. I'm just going to call this lila lilac. (laughs) Just there, like so, sort of lilacky. And it's a process color global, which is really good, because that way if you have to edit the swatch, everything using it will change. I've deselected, add to my library. We're going to do Creative Cloud Libraries a little bit later on in the chapter, but you can if you want to, and add it to a library ahead of time.

Hit OK, so that swatch is now added to the swatches panel here, like so. And I'm going to draw now a few shapes for the colors. So I'm going to draw a rectangle just here. M gets me the rectangle tool and I'll just draw that and then alt drag a copy from the center, just as we did earlier with the ellipses. Okay, so just go for that transformation point. Alt and I hold shift as well. And then just do command d to get the five supporting colors that we're going to have around this logo.

So with any one of those selected, what you can now do, is go to the color guide panel nest, normally underneath the color panel. But if it's not there then just go to the window menu to get it. And this allows us to do many, many things. One of which is, if we click here to set this as the base color, which I think it already picked up anyway, allows us to go through all of these different color harmonic rules in here, which is excellent.

We can also get it to show variations by the flyout. You can see that, warm and cold and vivid and muted, but tints and shades will be what we're after here. We want nice and soft and harmonious. So I'm thinking of a tetrad just here, so I'm just going to scroll down until I get to tetrad. Of course, remember those were the 90 degrees around on the color wheel. And then I'm going to choose some of the colors I like here from the choice of shades and tints.

And it's tints I'm really after here. And I kind of like this entire column. I like that softer color here as well, also. So what I'm going to do is click the topmost one. Okay, then hold down my command key, that would be control on a PC, and click the colors there that I like and want to use. And then tap this icon at the bottom. And if I go to my swatches panel I've got a color group just there, like so. In fact, I could even drag this swatch into the color group so now I've got my own lila color group, just here.

I'm then going to drag some of these swatches on to some of these rectangles. It's just typically how I work, it's not necessarily an industry prescribed way of working, it's just the way I do it. Again, I've just done it like that for years. (laughs) So, you know, just forgive me. If you want to do it a different way, that's entirely up to you. I tend to bring it out. Do you know what? I think those are going to work really, really well indeed. So I'm quite happy with that. So I'm going to apply some of those colors to the circles here.

So I'll start with the lilacky color just there, the very light pastel one. And then I'll go around, that sort of duck egg blue there. Come on to the bar here. It's a nice light salmon color. My art descriptions of course, not necessarily entirely in accord with yours. A sort of greenish one just there. And the nice light color just there. We turn up the background momentarily. I'm going to get rid of these swatches now actually too. Turn off the background, go to the layers panel and just click this icon here.

That's what it looks like, the visibility I got on layers. The template. Yep, do you know what? I think that's going to work really, really well. So save your work and we'll continue in the next movie.