Color.Adobe.com

In this video we're going to talk about adding color to your site, we're going to start using something called Adobe Color CC. It used to be called Cooler, if you remember him, but if you go to color.adobe.com and you sign in with your Creative Cloud license you'll get to here. If you have a pirated version it's not going to work as well, bits of it will work. I hope you got a little genuine version.

What we're going to do is skip 'Create', and go to one called 'Explore'. And what this is really for is, for people that, even with experienced designers alike, I find myself leaning on the same colors every time I do a design. If you come to me, and you're a baker, and you need a website, it's probably going to be green and gray at the moment, and if you are some international airline and you need work done, I'm probably going to make it green and gray. I'm stuck in a trap of using green and gray. To escape my trap I use this 'Explore' feature in Adobe Color. 

And what it means is I can go in here and-- I'm going to explore-- I think by default it's on, I'm not too sure, but go to 'Most Popular', I like it, of all time, maybe this month. It’s just going to give you things that other people are downloading, they're most popular colors, and often, pretty cool stuff comes to the top. Let's go 'All Time'. And these ones here, loads of colors. And what happens is, because you've logged in, what you can do is, say that you like 'Tech Office', you can click on the one that says 'Save', it's going to say-- you can rename it if you like. Actually I'd like you to put into my, remember we made that library a little bit earlier called 'Dans Portfolio', you can make a new one here, go right at the bottom, 'Create New Library', or just jam it into 'My Library', but I'm going to put mine as 'Dans Portfolio'. You could change it, that's okay, but I'm going to click 'Save', and the cool thing about it is, magically, hopefully, if I go to Illustrator now, and 'Dans Portfolio', and when you click that - I'm going to make this a little smaller - there he is there, there's the colors, and I can start using them. I can decide that actually I'm going to use that for the color.

It's just the Google Play that kind of starts drawing things, and you're like, "Okay, now things are starting to work in terms of how many of the color," because I’ve started with this template of color I guess. It's a good way to get going with your colors. What you can do for this class is you can go to the exact same site, and go to 'Explore', 'Search', and type in 'BYOL', and hopefully you'll find some of the ones that I'm using, the one I'm using in this class is called 'BYOL Portfolio - Illustrator'. Download that one, and we'll use that for this course.

If you are working in a larger agency, it's a great way to share brand colors, you can upload them, and there's a couple of different ways, you can go to 'Create', and you can go down here, and say, actually-- so 'CMIK' you can start typing these in and change them, and then hit 'Save', and they end up on this 'Explore' thing, and people can search, and share. It makes it really easy to share brand colors.

So let's download the BYOL one. 'BYOL', and I click on 'Save', put it into 'Dans Portfolio', great. Nice! So back in Illustrator, click the little Creative Cloud icon, and there he is there, I'm going to click on this, I right click him, and say 'Delete', don't need you.

So we've got our colors in, let's move on now and look at, let's say-- this is going to be a brand for this particular fake company or fake portfolio we're doing. If you've got actually specific colors and a logo to work from, I'm going to show you how to do that in the next video, and pull those colors for you