Possibly the most significant change to Illustrator in the update to CS3 is the introduction of Live Color. Adobe has told us how great this new color editing feature is, so as soon as I opened Illustrator CS3 for the first time, I went looking through menus for its name. Palettes, filters, effects… I couldn’t find it! I’ll never understand why it’s hidden under the more bland name “Edit Colors,” but at least I’m beginning to understand how it works.

Let’s look at how to use Live Color, starting with its cousin the Color Guide palette, found in Window > Color Guide. The Color Guide palette helps you choose color harmonies based on whatever main color you choose. For my example, I chose orange as a base, then selected a harmonious palette from the Color Guide. I liked “Complementary 2″ since it gave me a bold punch and enough colors to offer some variation in my design elements.

Once a harmony is selected, the Color Guide works just like other Illustrator swatches: Just select an object and pick a swatch from the palette to apply it.

So let’s say I like this complementary harmony, but I no longer want orange as my base. I have two options. One is to change the base to a new color, generating a new harmony in the Color Guide and recoloring every individual object’s color to something from the palette. Effective, but not efficient. Instead, I visit Live Color, either by choosing Edit Colors in the Color Guide palette’s flyout menu or by going to Edit > Edit Colors.

And now we see the Live Color name at the top of the new dialog. It’s about time!

Changing your color for the entire design, while maintaining your chosen harmony, is as simple as dragging the “color tools” (those clock-like hands) around the wheel—drag one and the others move to stay in harmony. So far, I’ve found it easiest to grab and move the main color (the largest circle) and let all of the secondary colors fall into place, but you can just as easily move the secondary colors first, say if you had something specific in mind for the text color.

If you want to get more sophisticated, you can adjust the brightness, saturation, and other features of the color wheel, add or subtract colors, use a specific swatch library (like Pantone), pick a new harmony type, save color groups, and even break the harmony. The Assign tab offers even more options so you can determine which new color gets assigned to which original color.

In my final example above, I’ve changed the harmony completely, switching to a Monochromatic one and changing the base to pink. I had to do some rearranging of the color assignments in the Assign tab—this will usually be the case when you change the entire harmony. You can further customize the assignments by adding new rows of color or clicking a button to let Illustrator randomly choose the color order. A little drag and drop if the assignments, and I was done!

Hours of entertainment, right? But you may be wondering how useful this heavily-hyped Illustrator feature really is on a day-to-day basis. My initial feeling is that it will be most useful at the beginning of a new design project, helping you select and test various harmonies to base the remainder of a design on. Or at the end of a project, when the client says (of your extremely complex design containing hundreds of objects), “Maybe the background should be green.” It will also come in very handy at many stages of an identity design project as you choose the appropriate colors for logos and supplementary materials and create color rules for the brand manual.

All in all, it looks Live Color is more than just eye candy and Adobe hype… it has a legitimate place in almost any Illustrator designer’s workflow.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 12:57 pm and is filed under Design, Design Careers, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.