Matching brand colors using Adobe Illustrator

In this video we're going to look at pulling colors from existing branded logos to use within your UI design.

Let's say we're doing some work for a company and you have their logo, you can bring it in, and we're going to 'File', 'Place', and in this example we're just going to use the 'Google Logo.png', bring it in, and let's say I want to draw some elements, say it’s our Hero box in the background here, but I wanted to match the Google colors. Let's pretend it's some random color to start with. With this selected, what you need to do is grab the 'Eye Dropper' tool, it's kind of hiding down here, and all you need to do is, with anything selected, just pick a color from it, and you can see it will start pulling the brand colors from that. How accurate will it be? Pretty accurate.

Let's say you want to kind of add them to use later rather than using the 'Eye Dropper' tool every time, what you're going to do is switch to your swatches panel. Now your swatches panel, if you can't find it, it's under 'Window', down to 'Swatches', turn it on, and think of swatches as pre-made, pre-mixed colors ready to use.

So what we're going to do is, let's pick this blue, what you can do is, up the top here, drop down, and there's an option that says 'New Swatch', give it a name, I'm going to call mine ' Google Blue', and click. You can see, it's both in my library, and it's down here in my 'Swatches' library. Just work your way through the colors. I'll grab the 'Eye Dropper' tool, red one, here, 'New', 'Google Red', there he is there, and he's down here in your swatches panel. The reason it's kind of good to have them in your swatches, you'll find that a little bit later on, you'll find that this libraries thing here is awesome for most things, it's new, and it's not perfect for everything yet, so sometimes you need them in your swatches panel as well