Color systems

Set up

Open your Project 1 draft: the hero and both spots in one Illustrator file, three artboards. If you do not have a vector draft yet, open Tuesday's shape-kit file instead. Save As lastname-color.ai.

Before you touch anything, count. Open the Swatches panel and the Color panel and click around: how many different fills are in the file, and how many of them are global swatches? Usually the answers are ten or more and none. Change one and nothing else moves. That is the problem.

The one rule

When you are done, the Swatches panel holds exactly three global swatches, plus black and white, and nothing else. Every fill and every stroke in the file points at one of the three. Nothing is painted with a loose color.

A global swatch has a small white triangle in its corner. Edit it and every object using it changes at once, on every artboard. That is the proof, and it is how you will be graded: I will double-click one of your swatches, change it, and watch.

What to make

Choose three. Decide which three colors the set needs. Think in value first: a light, a dark, and a middle. If two things that must separate are the same value, they will merge whatever hue you give them. Squint, or turn the screen gray, and see what holds. The Color Lab will show any set in gray, light to dark, beside its hues.

Make them global. New Swatch, tick Global, name it something you would say out loud: sky, skin, ground. Not C=12 M=40.

Map every fill. Select > Same > Fill Color grabs every object in one loose color, on every artboard; click a global and they all move together. Or open Recolor Artwork, set Colors to 3, and drag the loose colors onto your three. Either way, sweep until nothing loose is left. Then Select > Same > Stroke Color, because a stray stroke is a loose color too.

Keep the read. Everything that separated before still separates. Figures from ground, near from far, the thing the story is about from everything else. If two things merge, the fix is a value change or a tint, not a fourth color. A tint of a global is still that global.

Hand in

• The .ai file, Swatches panel showing three globals plus black and white.

Grade

Same day. 0, 2 or 3. The six exercises share one grade and the lowest is dropped.

• 2: exactly three global swatches, every fill mapped to one of them, and all three artboards still read.
• 3: all of that, and the three carry a deliberate value structure, a light, a middle and a dark that do work, not three hues that happen to differ.
• 1: more than three swatches, loose fills left behind, or a read that is lost, with things merged that should not.

After

Three is the exercise. If the set genuinely needs a fourth or fifth, add it tonight, as a global, and be able to say what it is for. By Tuesday the hero and both spots share one palette from one library.