While creating a postcard design, an essential aspect is adding colors. This article provides a step-by-step guide on how to choose color harmony rules on Adobe Color, fetch hex codes, and implement them into your design in Adobe Illustrator.
Key Insights
- The article provides a detailed instruction on how to use Adobe Color to choose colors for a postcard design. It suggests using Adobe Color's color wheel and color harmony rules to select and adjust colors.
- To apply the selected color into the design on Adobe Illustrator, it is advised to copy the hex code of each color from Adobe Color and paste it into Illustrator. Hex codes are universal codes used to designate specific colors across all platforms.
- The article goes further to demonstrate the process of creating a series of squares in Illustrator to contain the selected colors. This method helps to keep the colors within easy reach and saves time as you won't need to consistently revert to Adobe Color.
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In this video, we'll be working with colors. While we currently have our postcard set up, it's right now only in black and white.
So let's begin adding some colors. To do this, we're going to actually work with another Adobe resource to choose our colors. So let's open up a web browser, and within our web browser, we're going to type color.adobe.com and hit ENTER.
From here, we'll be working with an Adobe color. As we can see in the middle, we have a color wheel where we can click and drag interacting with different colors. On the left hand side, if we choose different color harmony rules, we'll see that as we click and drag, we get different options.
With these options, we have different colors, and below that, we have our hex code signifying the specific color that's been chosen. Hex codes are used across all platforms to designate certain colors, and so by clicking and dragging our color wheel colors, this will automatically change, keeping all the colors within our color harmony rules. In this case, we can choose whichever color harmony rule we'd like to choose for our postcard.
For our preview, I used compound colors, and for my example, I'm going to use the compound color harmony rule. However, feel free to choose whichever one you'd prefer. I'll select compound, and from here, I'm going to choose a set of colors that I feel is appropriate.
I'll make a few changes, and I'm going to stick with this set of colors. So to bring this into Illustrator now, I'll need to copy the hex codes and bring it into Illustrator. To do this, I'll double click the hex code, selecting only the numbers and letters, and I'll hit CTRL C on my keyboard.
Then I'll go back into Illustrator, and now we need to place this color somewhere. I found it's easiest to create a series of squares to contain these colors. To do this, let's first start a new layer, clicking the new layer icon, and we'll double click, and for this, we'll type colors and hit ENTER.
Because we're using this for both sides of our postcard, we don't need to specify whether it's the front or back. In addition, let's use the hand tool, shortcut h on the keyboard, to drag our perspective over so we can place our colors right in the middle. Next, with colors selected, let's use the rectangle tool to create five squares for us to contain these colors.
To do this, we'll simply click and drag a square and release, and for this square, we're going to select the stroke and select none. From here, we'll make sure that our fill color is on top, and we can double click the fill and hit CTRL V to paste the color that we've selected from Adobe Color. If we click ok, we'll see that the color has now copied the color that we've chosen from our first color.
Let's now copy our second one, double clicking the hex code and hitting CTRL C, and going back into Illustrator, we'll now create an additional square. To do this, we'll hit CTRL shift a to deselect, then hitting v on the keyboard for our selection tool, we'll hit ALT and click and drag
To the right, and let's create all five squares now. We'll hold ALT again and click to the right, ALT, click to the right, and click and drag to the right.
We now have our five squares, we just need to assign the colors. So let's now click the second color and double click the fill. From here, we can go to the bottom and with our hex code selected, hit CTRL V and ok.
We'll go back into our web browser, double click the third one, hit CTRL C, and go back into Illustrator, we'll hit CTRL shift a to deselect the second square, and selecting the third square, we'll double click the fill, hit CTRL V to paste our third hex code, and click ok. Then we'll select our fourth square, go back into our web browser, double clicking the hex code of our fourth color, hitting CTRL C, going back into Illustrator, double clicking the fill, and hitting CTRL V, and hitting ok. And finally, our fifth and final color, we'll go into our web browser, double click, and hit CTRL C, and then going to Illustrator, with this square highlighted, we'll double click the fill, and hit CTRL V, and ok.
While this may be a little difficult up front, I found that it's helpful to have these squares here, so we don't have to consistently go back to our web browser to see the color. Let's now save our work, hitting CTRL S on the keyboard, and in the next video, we'll use these colors to assign them to text. See you there!