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Drag-and-Drop Swatches to Artboard

This functionality wouldn't change the swatches palette it, but would allow users to drag a swatch to the artboard and drop it. You could tile several to create a tonal family or brand color set.

Being able to scale them larger, arrange them, reformat the grid, turn the white gap off in between colors would improve color adjustment and comparing hues side by side. They'd function like the existing swatches panel in that you could have a shape or stroke selected and apply the color by clicking the swatch on the artboard.

This would help in color exploration and creating effective color themes. Save common color usage in your workspace set up, export out as a group, share via Libraries, copy and paste artboard swatches to another file etc.

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Von Glitschka (Vonster) shared this idea  ·   ·  Report…  ·  Admin →
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Done (In Beta)  ·  AdminSaurav Agrawal (Admin, Adobe Illustrator) responded  · 

We are excited to announce that this feature is now available in BETA (starting V 29.1.28).

The new 'Generate color info' helps you share color information with others.

To use this, just select the colors from the swatch panel and click on 'generate color info' in the menu options.

You can customise the size, layout, color codes etc.

PS : Currently we only support CMYK values but other color codes such as RGB, HSB, spot vs process colors are in pipeline and we will ship them shortly.

Please try out this feature and let us know what you think!


Thanks

Saurav

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  • L Coyle commented  ·   ·  Report

    This would be an amazing addition to Illustrator. Having live swatches displayed as you need them next to the art - for presentation of color chips and for the functionality of having them attached to your art. I like option 2, and would love to have my global swatches next to my art that I can change and update the art. And what if Recolor Artwork could generate new global swatches (like it does for patterns and gradient swatches) when you recolor the art with the global color chips attached.

  • JPEGWEBER commented  ·   ·  Report

    If we had to choose, I'd choose option 2, but having the option for both would be ideal.

  • Xhico commented  ·   ·  Report

    I like Both Ideas to have as an option. I actually for years have been creating swatches that I copy over for projects to track my color for projects so I can do exactly as you suggest in #2. The current limitations of 5 colors in a paltter for a library is waaaayyy too limited. Can we get that amped up and then be able to access our swatches from LIbraries and launch the #2 pop-up window?

  • Von Glitschka commented  ·   ·  Report

    How about giving the user both. Let us have more choices. But based on how you framed the responses above I'd pick 2. 1 just seems like what we already have and if the swatches have white lines around them it doesn't help to make value judgements. Why can't you do what I mocked up in 'Drag-and-Drop_Swatches' image above? Then just give us controls like no white outline and let them behave like a regular swatch does?

    And since someone on the Ai team will read this, when will you fix the snapping bug in Ai? It's been over ten years and I showed your engineers in 2019 when I was in New Delhi and they confirmed it's broken but still no fix on a vector building functionality that should be ironclad dependable and isn't?

  • Hannah Wilson commented  ·   ·  Report

    Option 2!
    It's about time you responded to this suggestion from 3 YEARS AGO!!! Do better!

  • AriW commented  ·   ·  Report

    Method 2 please, following Von's original suggestion. That said, it would be a welcome addition to filter the Swatches Panel by selected.

  • Amybest222 commented  ·   ·  Report

    2. Selected Swatches to show up as rectangular objects on the canvas (in a separate layer). Users can use eyedropper to pick up colors (ability to pick Fill, Stroke, Appearance in such cases).

  • Darrian Bagley commented  ·   ·  Report

    2. Selected Swatches to show up as rectangular objects on the canvas

    Being able to quickly create shapes from swatches by clicking and dragging multiple will make it trivial to create visualizations of color palettes for brand guidelines. Especially if we're given options for the grid layout like mentioned in the original idea.

  • Yasir commented  ·   ·  Report

    I think it’s much faster to drag to drop to canvas,
    1: they are easy to see.
    2: you don’t have to enlarge layers, otherwise this will take up work area, and you only need certain swatches not all enlarged.

    Selected Swatches to show up as rectangular objects on the canvas (in a separate layer). Users can use eyedropper to pick up colors (ability to pick Fill, Stroke, Appearance in such cases).

  • Von Glitschka commented  ·   ·  Report

    The site wouldn't accept my original login. So I just voted for this again with my new login. It's like having a clone. I'm curious how many votes it takes to be added to a dev list? How many votes did it take to change the guides in Ai that no one was asking to be changed?

  • Willem Heijdeman commented  ·   ·  Report

    I would love to see this feature added in the next update. Thanks for sharing this Von Glitschka!

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Report

    Artboard swatches. This would be so helpful. I usually create a "Colors" layer manually to do some of this, but the functionality of having them still be Swatches would be very useful.

  • Ron Chan commented  ·   ·  Report

    This is something I can use a lot!

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Illustrator (Desktop) Feature Requests: Colors, Swatches, Patterns

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