Creating Unity in Your Designs
When you are designing for a brand, maintaining visual consistency across stock artwork is crucial. You might find a great vector image on Adobe Stock, but its color scheme does not match your existing brand palette or other assets.
Instead of manually selecting and recoloring every single shape inside Illustrator, you can quickly recolor the entire vector file in just a few clicks. Here is how to do it.
Step 1: Prep Your Swatches Panel
Start by opening a new document and clearing out your default swatches.
- Open the Swatches panel.
- Delete all extra swatch tiles, keeping only the None and Registration options.
Step 2: Grab the Color Palette You Want to Match
Next, bring in the source artwork or brand asset that already has the exact colors you want to use.
- Copy and paste your target illustration into your working file.
- Keep the pasted illustration selected.
- Click the flyout menu in the top-right corner of the Swatches panel.
- Select Add Selected Colors.
Illustrator will pull all the colors from that image and add them directly to your swatch list.
Step 3: Recolor the New Vector Image
Now it is time to transform your new stock artwork.
- Select your new vector image using the Selection Tool.
- Go to the top menu and select Edit, then Edit Colors, then Recolor Artwork.
- Look for the pop-up panel that appears. Keep in mind this panel can sometimes hide behind other active windows on your screen.
- Under Color Library, select Document Swatches.
Illustrator will automatically reassign the colors in your new image using the swatch palette you extracted earlier.
Step 4: Fine-Tune Your Colors
If you want to adjust how the colors are applied, you can tweak the settings right inside the Recolor Artwork panel.
- Play with the Prominent Colors settings to shift which colors take up the most visual space.
- Move the sliders to increase or decrease specific color tones.
- Click off the artwork when you are happy with the result to apply the changes.
If you ever need to manually fix a specific spot, grab your Direct Selection Tool to select an individual shape and change its fill color directly.
A Quick Tip on Backgrounds and Implied Space
Some stock vectors rely on a plain white background object to fill in gaps within the artwork. If you plan to place your vector on a colored background, you may need to handle those empty spaces. You can use tools like Pathfinder Divide to break apart shapes and fill in those open areas.
Happy designing!
Before you head back to your workspace, take a quick moment to reflect on something that brought you joy today.
