Alan Morse
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Alan Morse
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Alan Morse
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Let say I have a colour I want to use in a creative clould library. I want to use it as a base colour for a gradient, maybe I'll fade up to slightly lighter at the top. Not sure yet, I'm designing something, so I want to experiment when I work. I haven't decided on what colours to use yet, you know, because I'm designing. So what's the workflow to tell Illustrator about the gradient.
The current user experience.....
1. Select the object
2. Set the fill colour to gradient
3. Change the direction to vertical. (How often does anybody ever need a horizontal gradient? The Sky is up down, that's where most light comes from.)
4. The gradient is black and white, grayscale.
5. Click the colour swatch on the gradient. Nothing happens
6. Double click the tiny weeney colour swatch. A dialog opens with arbitrary swatch colours in it. None is the one I want. How do I pick the colour I want? Oh, I can't.
7. So after much messing around I have to deselect my object.
8. Double click the colour in the library panel
9. Accept the dialog the pops up
10. Open the swatch panel
11. Click the tiny weeny new swatch icon
12. Select my object
13. Double click the tiny weeney swatch icon
14. Choose my newly created swatch in the modal swatch dialog. OK now after fourteen steps I have one of the colours in my gradient.
15. Now to make the second colour a subtle variation of my first chosen colour? Well now that is tricky. I have to deselect my object.
16. Select the original colour in the swatch panel to load it into the fill colour, but of course it has to be with nothing else selected so as not to mess up the work I've already done it adding the first colour to the gradient.
17. Double click the fill colour and choose my subtle colour variation in the colour mixer
18. Go back to the swatch panel and click the teeny weeny new swatch button. The tiny new swatch is loaded into an arbitrary location in the swatch panel, so you have to watch carefully. If it is similar to any other colour you might have to do this again so you can be sure when you are picking the right one in a few steps time.
19. Memorise the location of your new swatch in the swatch panel.
20. Select your object again
21. In the gradient panel double click the teeny weeny colour swatch.
22. Retrieve the location of your subtle colour in the modal swatch dialog from your human memory. 23. Click it. Now you have your gradient, but wait, I'm not sure about that second colour. I'd like to add more saturation. What to do? You guessed it folks. Go back to step 15.
Would it be that hard for the user experience to be something like the following?
1. Select that blue box
2. Choose gradient as the fill type
Oh wow! One of the gradient colours is the blue it started out as. That's helpful
3. What about the second colour? Click the button for the second colour. A modal colour picker appears. Choose your color.
4. Done
I love Adobe products and use them all day every day. My work over the past twenty years has covered graphic design for print to visual effects for feature films. I've been using a host of creative software for a long time. The example above is just one of many that makes Illustrator extremely frustrating to use in comparison to almost any other creative software. If you could fix this it would ease the sinking feeling I have every time I fire up Illustrator.
Thanks, hopefully.