Discover the method of coloring and stylizing graphs in Adobe. Learn how to create custom color themes, modify existing themes, and apply these themes to your graphs and images.
Key Insights
- This tutorial demonstrates the steps to create a custom color theme in Adobe, including choosing the colors, customizing them as per your liking, and saving the theme for future use.
- The tutorial also guides on how to modify existing color themes and save the revised versions. Details on applying these color themes to an artboard and images are also given, with a specific example of changing colors of a pie graph shared.
- The article further explains how to create text panels and color them using the created or modified Adobe color themes. The process of duplicating existing panels to create new ones is also highlighted.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
In this video, we will be coloring and stylizing our graph. Let's begin by creating a set theme for our image.
We will go to Adobe Color Themes on the top-right-hand side, and from here, we will create our own Adobe color theme. To do this, we can toggle through the colors to create a theme with multiple colors up top. From here, we can customize these colors by dragging them around, and as we do, we’ll see the five colors above.
Feel free to customize your colors however you prefer. For me, I’ll stick with this set of colors. To save this, we can go to the bottom, double-click, name it 'Theme One, ' and click Save.
We’ll save it to the library or create a new library, then click Save.
Additionally, we can explore themes that have already been created. To do this, we’ll go to Explore and browse through different themes. Feel free to choose a theme you prefer. I like the look of the 'Mix Match Six' theme; however, I want to make a quick change to it.
To do this, we’ll click on the three dots on the bottom-right-hand side and select 'Edit This Theme.' From here, we’ll see that this theme is now in our Create section, and we can make changes as needed. I’ll bring this blue in a little bit and darken it. Now, I like the look of this.
We’ll then double-click the title, name it 'Theme Two, ' and click Save. We’ll save it to my library and click Save again.
Now, if we go to My Themes on the right-hand side, we’ll see that the two themes we just selected and added are now available here.
To apply these colors to our artboard and images, we can simply click on them. Now, let’s change the color of our pie graph.
To do this, we actually need to use the Direct Selection Tool. If we clicked with the Selection Tool (shortcut V), we’d select the entire graph. Therefore, we’ll click outside, lock our background layer, and with nothing selected, we’ll hit A on the keyboard. Let’s start by selecting the top-right slice of our pie graph.
From here, we can apply any of the colors simply by clicking on them. In this case, I’m going to apply the red color.
Next, let’s color the other two. Feel free to color them however you prefer. I’ll select the bottom slice and apply the yellow color for this. Finally, I’ll select the top-left slice and apply the orange color.
We’ll click outside to deselect, and for now, let’s lock our pie graph layer.
We’ll go to the right-hand side and lock this layer. Then, we’ll create a new layer to add our text panels on the right-hand side.
We’ll double-click our layer, name it 'Panels, ' and hit ENTER. Now, we’re ready to create them.
To do this, let’s use the Rectangle Tool and drag a rectangle. Our first rectangle will be for the title, highlighting this top-right part, and we’ll leave it about this size.
Next, we want to change the color of this top panel. To do this, we could go into Color and select a color, or we can continue using our Adobe Color Themes and select one of the colors here. In this case, I like the darker blue, so I’ll choose it and hit CTRL + SHIFT + A to deselect.
Next, let’s create the panel containing more text below. I could use the Rectangle Tool again and create another larger panel, or I can work off what I already have by hitting V on the keyboard to select the top panel. Then, we’ll duplicate this panel by holding ALT and dragging it down, holding shift to ensure that we drag it only downward.
We’ll release right about here, drag below, and release again. Then, we’ll drag to the right, holding ALT so it drags from the center.
I’ll then release right about here. For now, we’ll simply leave these here, as we’ll be centering all of our image pieces in the future.
Let’s save our work by hitting CTRL + S on the keyboard, and in the next video, we will add text to our text panels. See you in the next video!