Skip to content

Illustrator (Desktop) Feature Requests

← Adobe Illustrator

When entering a new feature request, please provide:

  1. Description
  2. Why is this valuable to you?

How can we improve Illustrator (desktop)? Vote or share a new idea — one request per entry, please.

(thinking…)

Enter your idea and we'll search to see if someone has already suggested it.

If a similar idea already exists, you can support and comment on it.

If it doesn't exist, you can post your idea so others can support it.

Enter your idea and we'll search to see if someone has already suggested it.

  • Hot ideas
  • Top ideas
  • New ideas
  • My feedback

254 results found

  1. Should be allowed to remove the registration color swatch

    Should be allowed to remove 'registration' from color swatch panel.

    3 votes
    1 comment  ·  Colors, Swatches, Patterns  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  2. Repeating pattern random recolor art

    The merger of Recolor Art and the idea of variations in the context of repeating patterns. The Recolor Art needs a slot like interface where the user can store several variations on a theme into 'alt slots' these could be accessed by the repeating pattern algorithm to generate a more diverse result. Perhaps with variations on size and rotation of the constituent elements.

    3 votes
    0 comments  ·  Colors, Swatches, Patterns  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  3. Add colors from toolbar to swatches in Illustrator

    I would like to suggest that you should add a feature of "Add to swatches" from Indesign to Adobe Illustrator also. As you'd know in Indesign when we right click in ToolBar on froreground color or Outline we can simply add the color to swatches easily, but in illustrator we have to drag forcefully and drop it in Swatches panel.
    Attached is a screenshot from Indesign and Illustrator Workspaces for your reference.

    3 votes
    1 comment  ·  Colors, Swatches, Patterns  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  4. Freeform gradient live update option

    While live update is a nice thing to have (we still wait until you make all draggable art live updated), it's still not very fast.
    Please make an option to turn off live update for freeform gradients, so a fill would update only when you release fill points.

    3 votes
    0 comments  ·  Colors, Swatches, Patterns  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  5. Separating Swatches/Color for Objects and Tools?

    Insanely enough that Illustrator still not able to distinct in betweet color swatches for selected objects/paths and swatches for tools (Brushes, Live Paint, Paint Bucket, etc.) are you nuts guys?

    3 votes
    1 comment  ·  Colors, Swatches, Patterns  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  6. Find approximate/closest Pantone from a process color

    If you choose a color from the color picker in Photoshop, it will show you the nearest equivalent in the Pantone library.

    3 votes
    4 comments  ·  Colors, Swatches, Patterns  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  7. Include Photoshop's Gamut Warning feature

    Photoshop has a great feature that, in the color picker, greys out any colors unavailable in CMYK. This makes choosing appropriate colors for a project much faster and easier. It would be nice if Illustrator had this same functionality.

    3 votes
    0 comments  ·  Colors, Swatches, Patterns  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  8. Make New Swatch more intuitive and flexible

    When 'None' is selected as current color (or no selection is active), the New Swatch menu item is grayed out, since New Swatch wants to copy the color of the selection.

    When having a complex selection (lots of effort sometimes), it is rather dissapointing to not have the possibillity to give it a new color on the fly.

    Why not make 'New Swatch' always available?

    1. Intuitively, when no color is active, it should bring up a color selector panel, just like when an existing Swatch is double clicked.
      (If you think this is confusing - add a menu item for…

    3 votes
    1 comment  ·  Colors, Swatches, Patterns  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  9. Select All Unused Key Command

    Hello,

    It would be very useful if custom key commands could be applied to palette commands. Specifically, I would love to create a key command for "Select All Unused" in the swatches palette drop-down menu. It currently requires a click in the palette, scroll down to select the command, clicking the garbage can in the palette then clicking (or enter/return) to confirm that you want to delete unused swatches. Some days I convert hundreds of files swatches from Pantone to CMYK then to RGB. A key command would speed this up dramatically!

    Thank you!
    User since Illustrator 88!

    3 votes
    2 comments  ·  Colors, Swatches, Patterns  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  10. Eyedropper invert ticks with key

    It would be really useful to hold a key with eyedropper to either sample everything, invert ticks, or invert true/false of including "Appearance" .

    3 votes
    0 comments  ·  Colors, Swatches, Patterns  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  11. Option to turn off swatches automatic naming by color

    Swatches get named by the color code automatically. This ends up conflicts with swatches with same color definition. Even in preview mode in global swatch I get message that same name exists. Really annoying and I have to name swatch 'asdfasfdasdf' mostly.

    Suggestion: Option turn off naming by color, but name like swatch 1, swatch 2.

    3 votes
    10 comments  ·  Colors, Swatches, Patterns  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  12. Add a way to protect chosen colors in Recolor while randomizing, and allow to limit chosen colors to different libraries, all in one session

    I use the Recolor (color mixer/wheel) daily. I have come across a couple features missing.

    Feature Request 1:
    - I use the 'randomize/recolor' tool to scroll through a self-made palette and recolor prints with several colors.
    - When I've come across a semi-acceptable mix, I can't lock in the colors I like.
    - To hold those colors, I have to save and close the color mix window, then reopen and 'lock' those colors
    - This adjusted feature would allow me to 'lock' the couple colors that are working for the print, while being able to scroll through options for the…

    3 votes
    1 comment  ·  Colors, Swatches, Patterns  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  13. Larger Stroke/Fill selector in Swatch panel

    It is extremely difficult to choose the between the Fill and Stroke selector in the Swatch panel., especially on Retina displays. Please give us the option to make it larger, as seen in my attachment.

    3 votes
    0 comments  ·  Colors, Swatches, Patterns  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  14. the ability to zoom in on the gradient panel for complex gradients

    the ability to zoom in on the gradient panel for complex gradients. If I am creating a gradient some time I feel like I need to zoom into the panel so I can ensure I get the color pointers as accurate as possible

    3 votes
    1 comment  ·  Colors, Swatches, Patterns  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  15. Color swatch mapping with presets for print production

    I made this script using ChatGPT, it does mostly everything I need, but I ran into the issue that the option "Merge Swatches" in the Swatches panel, cannot be used/accessed with JavaScript.

    I work as Prepress designer and I have to constantly change spot colors to match the swatches that the print operators need to match the colors the client need (Pantone match or paint swatches). Most of these colors are saved in an .ASE file and I have to manually merge them multiple times.

    I thought my script was going to fix this for me until I hit that…

    2 votes
    4 comments  ·  Colors, Swatches, Patterns  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  16. Placeholder Spot Color Swatch Assigned in Illustrator Then Defined in InDesign (and other Adobe Apps - especially AE and Premier)

    This would be a joint effort between AI and INDD. But being able to assign a spot color swatch placeholder to a graphic like any other spot swatch (with tint support) that can then be assigned via the links panel in InDesign.

    Often I need to color coordinate graphics with a document I am building in InDesign. I typically do this by either generating multiple artboards or layers with the variations I need. But sometimes for one-off projects or projects where there may need to be many variations it just makes the AI file much more cumbersome to deal with.

    …

    2 votes
    0 comments  ·  Colors, Swatches, Patterns  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  17. Make Pattern Options work when stroke is selected in tool panel

    You can't open the pattern editor from swatches panel or from shortcut if stroke is selected in tools panel. I shot screen grab to demonstrate.

    I can see why it might be desired behaviour, but you can still select patterns to fill a selection, while stroke is selected in tools panel. so it doesn't seem to make sense.

    If fill is selected, you can enter the pattern editor for a selected swatch, from the swatches panel independent of pattern swatches in use or active in project. But if stroke is active/selected you can not.

    Uploaded unlisted full res screen capture…

    2 votes
    1 comment  ·  Colors, Swatches, Patterns  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  18. Allow to set text format for CMYK values and other data in Swatch Info objects

    The data for CMYK values in cards inside of Swatch Info is formatted with commas.
    I’d like to have the ability to customize it: spaces, hyphens, as C100 M50 Y0 K0, etc.

    2 votes
    0 comments  ·  Colors, Swatches, Patterns  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  19. Allow to use custom user templates for Swatch Info objects

    Swatch Info is OK (if completed!), but there is not enough customization currently.
    Take a look what an awesome ColorList script by Katja Bjerrum offers: https://productivista.com/make-a-list-of-colors-from-your-selection/ — we can set our own shapes before making a color legend.
    We could have done it semi-automatically after creating a Swatch Info, with Global Edit, to replace all chips with a custom shape... but for some reason these rectangles are immune to Global Edit (as it often happens, new features get loosely integrated with existing functions...)

    This actually also includes text parameters, but perhaps it’s a separate request... Sure, the font is the…

    2 votes
    0 comments  ·  Colors, Swatches, Patterns  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  20. Retain original, unexpanded art for pattern swatches.

    "This pattern contains active content (symbols, effects, etc, it's a long list) that must be expanded to create a swatch. If you edit the pattern again, the expanded content will no longer be active."

    There's a lot of clever, well-paid people at Adobe. I bet someone there can figure out how to store the original pattern art along with the expanded pattern art, and edit the former rather than the latter when I double-click on the pattern swatch. I have workarounds for this but they are tedious and annoying ones.

    Also I would like to thank whoever wrote the dialogue…

    2 votes
    2 comments  ·  Colors, Swatches, Patterns  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?
1 2 … 5 7 9 … 12 13
  • Don't see your idea?

Illustrator (Desktop) Feature Requests

Categories

Feedback and Knowledge Base

(thinking…)