Using Brand Colours and Adobe Color
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
Alright, in this video were going to look at using branded colours and also the adobe colour libraires. So were going to open up an exercise file, so go to file, open and open up the colour.fla, great. and were going to go recolour this alien octopus thing. And to do it we can obviously select it and go through and pick different colours from here and there's nothing wrong with that, and if you want branded colours, you’ve got to use this little rainbow coloured wheel up here and this guy here you can type in your RGB colours or this hexadecimal number here. so you just type over the top of them to get your colours. Now lets say though were experimenting with colours and were not forced into branded colours. We get to experiment with some other things. Adobe colors a really cool website. So what happens is I need to open up my window, I'm going to open up my, CC libraries. And this is built into all the new adobe products and it links to my library. Mines quite full, yours might be empty if you're new to it. And what you need to do is you need to switch out to chrome, I'm going to switch out to, color.adobe.com. And you'll see in here that color.adobe.com, I've logged into this website. If you haven’t logged into the website using your adobe id, the same one you’ve used in adobe animate. So there's me, that’s my email address and I can check in adobe animate under help that there's that same email address again so that’s how I know I'm logged into the same account, and in here. this creates, its quite interesting. You might have say a colour here, you might type it in, you play around with your CMYK colours or switch down here, there's RGB and say this is the corporate colour you have to stick to, its kind of red, kind of brown colour. And what you can do up here is you can go in here and say I want a complimentary colour to this or colours from the triad, monochromatic colours from there, it just helps you pick five colour swatches that you might start using in your graphics so it helps me when I get stuck using the same colours when I do something. Everythings green and grey, so this helps me bust out of that, try to find some other colours as a nice little group.
Alright so that’s one thing, create. I love this explore thing, so the explore thing is the nice bit. These are the most used colours of all time, what it means is that people have downloaded them and used them in their projects the most. So you'll find that this is really nice stuff at the top here. you can also do some searches, I'm going to type in the 80’s and you'll see that hopefully, we get some 80’s colours. So there's some really good 80’s colours in here. So if I pick 80’s, what is this one, I think this ones fanny pack, I think I've used this one before. Hmm, gulp. So I'm going to hit save and what happens is, okay its just called flashback 80’s. That’s great, I can save it to, can you see the different libraries in here, I've got lots in here, you might just have probably one my library. Which you should, you can give it a different name. You might call it the bring your own laptop 80’s and you save it. And what happens is in adobe animate, you'll see here in a second if you're in the right library. There it is there, bring your own laptop 80’s appears. And what it means is you can select on these guys and I can say I want you to be that colour, I want his eyes to be this colour and I'm going to pick these circles underneath. Pick another colour, oh, I didn’t pick those at all. You can kind of start 80fying your design.
You can see what I did there, I tried to move my library and it got snapped next to this, that’s totally fine but I'm going to unsnap it. It just means that this guy was kind of in the way so I was trying to move it around. What you might do, now I've just joined it to the top. Stop moving it around Dan, I'm going to move it safely here in the middle. What I'm looking for is the bottom of this thing here, because I don’t want it to join that. I just want to make it a little bit smaller and I can’t quite reach the bottom mainly because of my dock, there he is there. Wow, palaver. Okay, so say you are using this thing quite a bit, your libraries, which you might do, you can click hold and drag it and just dump it into underneath this guy here, it means it just pops in and out. It’s a nicer way of using it.
Alright so, this guy here, remember this guy is ungrouped so he’s really easy to colour. Now what we can do is I want to go in, I'm going to bop this out and I want to change my background stage colour. So I'm going to pick, it’s a little hard to pick actually because the stage pops out, and this guy pops back in. so I'm back to having that out, and where is my 80’s colours. There you are. They're all terrible, okay, great. I'm going to pop you back in there my friend. And this one here’s been grouped, now remember instead of ungrouping it what we can do is double click it. Everything else greys out and I cant touch it. And I'm inside this group, so I'm going to click on this part, and I'm going to go, where is this guy. And I'm going to pick, and this colour I'm going to pick, wow this is tragic. None of them are good, okay. So I've picked 80’s. you can do searches in here, so lets go back to explore, I'm going to do search, there's things like café. And you can get café style colours, you can put bank and you get random stuff. You can see they're kind of coffee colours in here, there's lots of ways of searching and surprisingly how many corporate colours are in here. So you're doing work for Dell and you will find often, I'm guessing here, you'll find their brand colours, ready to go specked up. So lots of dell stuff in there. I'm from Auckland in New Zealand. Type in Auckland, its surprising what Auckland colours appear in here, so these are designers who have uploaded colours to share. You can see here is the Auckland Cityscape, that’s the Auckland council colours. AT is Auckland transport. There's some really good useful colours in here, loads and loads of Auckland. So if you search your company or business and you might find something that works for you. But again remember under all themes, the most popular or the most used will give you some really fresh new colours to start working with.
Alright, so that’s how to use your branded colours and also how to dive into adobe Color with no U. I'm a dirty foreigner so I have u’s in all my colour, you'll see it in all the file names there. Alright, see you in the next video.