Change pattern colors, possibly with an Expand or Colorize effects
If I have a design that uses a pattern, and I need to have the colors in this pattern to change, I’d have no choice but to create several copies of it and change colors in each one.
It means that if I change a pattern later, I’d have to either change all the copies of the pattern, or repeat the changes in each copy of the original. And surely I can’t utilize global swatches for this, because duplicating one doesn’t work as expected. We don’t have proper variables to use also.
Symbols won’t work in patterns (they get expanded silently if you try to use one by drag-n-drop — https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/333657/suggestions/51662026), so I can’t utilize them to build pattern copies faster.
There are certain hacks...
I can make a black-and-white variant of my pattern and put it in an opacity mask of a shape, as a giant rectangle, to allow me editing the colored shape later.
There’s this great trick — https://x.com/toyotoyo2ro/status/1611781124635910144 — that uses flat front 3D legacy Extrude and the Pathfinder Exclude (you can see how it works in the file attached)... it crops, trims, cleans the pattern much more effectively than a manual expand and further cleaning would sometimes, but the Classic 3D is capricious and can 'hit the RAM roadblock' at any moment.
So...
Perhaps you can make a dedicated Expand effect, that would allow us to expand patterns live? It’d still need to know how Appearance work and how you can arrange attributes and effects...
Or perhaps introduce a colorize effect we can assign to a pattern fill/stroke and force colors — something like this Shift Color effect by Astute graphics allows? — https://docs.astutegraphics.com/phantasm/shift-to-color
AdminEgor Chistyakov
(Admin, Adobe Illustrator)
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