Let’s take a look at a few ways you can customize the fill and outline settings, define your custom colors and personalize your default settings to get more from Adobe Illustrator when designing your custom stickers or labels. 

Changing The Fill And Outlining Colors

With your Shape tool selected, you can open your Properties window to find the Fill option under the Appearance section. When you click on this, a window will open with a selection of color swatches. You can choose any of these to change the Fill color in your shape to quickly get started. 

To change the outline, keep your shape selected and in the same Properties window, choose the Stroke option. Your Swatches window with color selections will open again for you to choose. the color you want for your outline. 

Tip: By selecting the white swatch with the red line crossing through, you will remove your outline or fill, depending on what option you have selected.

How To Create Custom Colors

Now that you know how to change the fill and outline, you can take it a step further by creating your own custom color palettes in your Swatches. Here’s how you can bring your brand colors into your sticker or label designs.

Often times you may be matching designs to a brand guideline or working with colors from existing designs. In these cases, you can easily find your colors with the eyedropper tool to essentially take a sample of the color and add it to your color palette.

To sample a color, first open the image you are finding colors from. Select your Eyedropper tool and click on the color you want to work with. When a new color has been selected in your Color Picker window, the color fill box in the lower left hand of your screen will show the newly selected color.

Open your Swatches window, along the right-hand side of your screen. If you do not see it, you can open it under the Window option in your menu. To add your new color to your swatches, click on the color in the Color Picker box in the lower left and simply drag and drop this new color into your Swatches window.  

You can also add your colors with the identifying codes for your colors in CMYK. Adding colors with this method means you can get a closer match for your colors when your designs are printed into custom stickers or labels. If you know the CMYK color identifiers, here is how you can add these colors to your Swatches.

Find the settings for defining colors directly from your Color Picker by double-clicking it in the lower left corner of your screen. In this window, you can use the fields to define the identifiers for the CMYK combination. Once you have entered the correct identifiers, your color will appear in the sample square at the top of your window.

After confirming your color, you can use the steps above to add it to your color swatches so it’s always easy to find.

Once your custom colors have been identified and added to your custom swatches, all you have to do is simply click the color and start working with it! As long as you have your color swatch selected and it is appearing in the color fill and stroke boxes in the lower left corner of your window, any tool that paints, draws or fills will do so with the color you have selected.

Now you can change the colors in your designs and work with the colors you have defined in your brand guidelines so your custom stickers and labels will represent your brand anywhere they may travel!

Still have questions about color? Reach out to our Customer Service Team. 

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