How to find amazing colors in Illustrator using Color Theme

Hey there, in this video we're going to look at color combinations. We're going to let Adobe help us find new exciting colors that we might not normally go for. Now I'm not saying these are all beautiful, but I'm saying, it's kind of giving me, and pushing me out of my normal colors, that I normally use. So let's let Adobe show us how to do that now.

To find our lovely colors we're going to open up a file, 'Color Theme.ai'. That will be in your 'Exercise Files'. You can go up to 'Window', come down to 'Color Themes', open that up. Now yours has probably defaulted to 'Create', click on 'Explore'. It may take a little while to load, a long time to load, sometimes. Sometimes I'm using this panel, it loads very fast, as it is now, but sometimes it does take a long time. What we're looking for is-- we're going to switch ours to 'Most Popular', and, of 'All' time. This is going to give you some, five color Swatches that work well together. Just really helps people like me who end up kind of falling back on the same colors. If you're doing this tutorial you'll notice that pretty much everything is this gray and kind of green. I want to say, kind of a turquoise kind of green. Just the colors I like at the moment, and it's hard to break out of that.

So if you come to me, you want café, you're probably going to get green and gray. And if you want to be a bank, you'd probably get green and gray. So not the best move. So all you need to do is click on one of the elements and then pick one of the colors. I'm going to say, this. It's a little weird sometimes. Here we go. 'Black Arrow', click on that, I'm going to pick another color. Click on this, I'm going to leave him white. This guy here is going to be dark green, maybe the dark one here. And this guy over here, cam be the tan. Then the logo here, I'm going to switch out to the green as well. So that's how you do color options. Just kind of getting out of your comfort zone for colors.

Next thing I want to do is make a duplicate. Say you have to go to the client with a few color options. So, grab the 'Artboard Tool', it's down the bottom here. And if you click the word 'Artboard', and start dragging it, just moving it, but if I'm dragging, dragging, dragging, and I hold down the 'Option' key on a Mac, or the 'Alt' key on a PC, it makes a duplicate while I'm dragging, which is really handy. So 'Black Arrow'. Now, we've used 'Most Popular of All Time'. You can go to just this 'Month', I find, this 'Week' is a good option. If you go to 'Month', it's pretty close to the 'All Time' ones, whereas 'Week', just this week, somebody went out, these are the ones that are trending at the moment, that people are using. So I might go, okay, I'm going to do something like, here's my green. I'll give it a dark color there. Now I'm just coloring a bit. But you get the idea, right?

There's a couple of other things I want to show you. That's doing with the color option. You got to make sure you're dragging directly on that icon there. Gets a bit confused. So we'll just use 'Most Popular'. 'Most Used', it's kind of similar because there's a voting system on the backed. If you go to color.adobe.com, you can vote for colors, and upload it, but this little search option's quite handy. Say I need something for-- of the 1980s, say my guy there needs a flyer. For some reason it's a bit buggy, lots of the same colors, but if you scroll down, you can see, it starts getting into other colors. It's a bit of a weird one but there's plenty of 80s to go around, especially that first one.

Everyone's parents got a ski suit in the cupboard. A one piece ski suit that looks like this. It's a wrong image for it. Somebody's gone, "Pretty bad, Dan." But you get the idea. What you might do in more of a practical sense is let's look at one more. Instead of looking for the 80s you might look for something like 'cafe'. You can get kind of cafe style coffee looking things. You can type in 'bank', you can actually type some actual brands. So if I put in-- what's the brand that I know of by heart? Let's put in 'Google', you get the Google colors. So, big brands. Weirdly you can find lots of brands. Like, I'm from Auckland in New Zealand, it's a tiny, not tiny, but it's unlikely, but there's the Auckland Council stuff, there's Auckland city scape, there's Auckland Transport. There's all sorts of stuff that people are using, uploading, and sharing. You might find your company, or something that you're using in there.

So, that's it for the Color Theme Tool. It's just really handy to grab Swatches. To kind of bust out of your common green, gray funk that you might be in, like me. All right, that's it for the Color Theme Tool. See you in the next video.