To start working with color in Illustrator CC you'll learn what Stroke and Fill are, apply colors that come with each document and then you'll make a new color using the Color Picker. To follow along you can use your own file, or you can open this file from the practice files. You'll start out by learning what Stroke and Fill are by selecting some artwork. So, select the Selection tool in the Tools panel on the left and click to select this large green shape. Shapes and other vector artwork as well as text in Illustrator CC can have a Fill and a Stroke. For this green shape the green color is the Fill and the red color is the Stroke or border surrounding the Fill. You can apply a solid color like the red or green or a gradient which is basically a blend from one color to another or a pattern to the Fill or Stroke of an object in Illustrator CC. Now, if you look at the Properties panel to the right of the document you'll see a Fill color and a Stroke color for the selected artwork. Click the Fill color and you'll see an option for showing a series of default saved colors called Swatches. There's also an option for mixing or creating your own color. Make sure the Swatches option is selected. Each new document you create comes with a number of default swatches. Try clicking a few of the colors to see how they look in the document and notice that there are some pattern and gradient swatches as well. Make sure you wind up with a red color in the shape. Now to change the Stroke color for the selected shape, in this case you'll remove it. So, press Esc to hide the Color panel. Click the Stroke color below the Fill color here in the Properties panel and make sure that the Swatches option is still selected. Choose the color None to remove the red stroke. Press Esc to hide the panel. Having default colors is a great way to jumpstart your design but what if you want to make your own colors. You can use several methods in Illustrator CC including using the Color Picker to do that. Next, you'll make a new color for the red shape on the right. So, click to select it. The first thing you need to do is decide which color to change for the selected artwork, the Fill or the Stroke. If you look at the bottom of the Tools panel on the left, you'll see two boxes. They represent the Fill and the Stroke. To edit the Fill in this case, double-click the Fill box to open the Color Picker. Now in the Color Picker dialog box you can create color in a lot of ways, visually, typing in exact number values, even choosing from existing color libraries that come with Illustrator CC. You'll create a color visually. If you drag in the Color Spectrum bar here, you can pick a color like a light blue color. To pick the exact color you want you can then come into this color field and click. The color you selected is showing here and to apply the color to the Fill of the selected shape simply click OK. Making a color with the Color Picker is a great way to quickly create a color but that color isn't automatically saved so that you can use it again. This red shape needs to have the same blue Fill color as the blue you just created. If you want to apply the same formatting from one object to another like the blue Fill color, you can select the shape you want to change, then click another object with the Eyedropper tool to apply the same color. So, click to select this red shape. In the Tools panel on the left select the Eyedropper tool. Click the blue shape to apply the same Fill and Stroke to the red shape. You're essentially sampling the color. To deselect the artwork choose Select, Deselect. Using color well can mean the difference between good design and great design. And now that you know how to apply and make your own colors you can experiment freely and find the exact colors you need for your designs.

To work smarter in Illustrator CC you can save a color you create in a document as a swatch and reuse that color later which allows you to work faster and achieve color consistency. To finish this design, you'll save a color you create as a swatch in your document and then apply that color to artwork. You can open a file you have or open this document from the practice files for this tutorial. With the Selection tool selected click this green building shape so that you can easily apply the color fill of the shape to other objects like the other building shapes, you'll save this green color in the document as a swatch. In the Properties panel on the right click the Fill color and make sure that this Swatches option is selected to see a host of colors that are saved as swatches in this document. To save this new color as a swatch click the New Swatch button at the bottom of the panel. In the New Swatch dialog box that opens you can give the color a name like Buildings or something else, something that makes sense to you now and will also make sense to you later. Consider that you may use this color for something other than just building shapes in the future. Notice the Global option here which is selected by default. This means that if you later change the color of this swatch everything with the color applied will update. Deselect Add to my Library so the color isn't saved in the Creative Cloud Library and then click OK. You should now see it as a swatch in the panel. The swatch has a border highlight. That means this color is applied to the fill of the selected artwork. Know that swatches you create are only saved in the open document. Now that the color is saved as a swatch you can easily apply it to other artwork. Click one of the blue building shapes and to select the others press the Shift key and click the other two buildings to select all three. Pressing the Shift key when you select artwork allows you to add objects or remove them from the current selection. Now you'll apply the swatch you made. Click the Fill color in the Properties panel on the right. You should see this little white triangle in the corner of the swatch. That means it's a Global swatch. So, if you edit that color it will edit all content with that swatch applied. Select the swatch you created to apply it to all of the selected shapes. Press Esc to hide this panel, then click in a blank area so you can deselect those building shapes. Now you'll edit that green swatch. Editing a Global swatch you create by default will update all of the building shapes at once even without selecting them. With the Selection tool selected click one of the green shapes. That way we can see the colors over here in the Properties panel. To edit the green color, click the Fill color in the Properties panel and double click the green swatch you made. When you're creating a swatch you’re usually mixing various colors together. Colors created for print projects combine four printing inks found in the typical printer, cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, also known as CMYK. To change the color swatch, you can edit each of the CMYK colors independently, adding more or less of each to the overall color. You can drag a slider like the yellow color here to add more or less of a color to the overall mix or if someone gives you specific color values you can type them in. Drag the Cyan or Blue slider to the left to remove cyan, making the color more yellow-green. To see the change in the artwork, select Preview. If you need you can drag this dialog box out of the way by the title bar at the top. Notice that all of the building shapes with that swatch applied have changed. Click OK. Then to deselect everything click in a blank area. Saving your own colors as swatches can help you work faster and achieve more consistent color across your artwork. It's also fun. So, take a few minutes to experiment with color in this artwork or in your own. 

To complete this logo design, you'll learn about working with the stroke of an object, and you'll explore adding and editing dashes to lines and finally add arrowheads to these paths. If you'd like to follow along you can open this file from the practice files for this tutorial. The first change you'll make is to the appearance of the stroke or border on this shape. With the Selection tool selected in the Tools panel click to select this blue circle. Notice the weight or size of the Stroke in the Properties panel to the right of the document. It's 15 pt. To change the Stroke weight, you can click the arrows to the left of 15 pt, choose a value from the menu or even type a value in. To make the Stroke smaller change the Weight to 13 pt by clicking the down arrow a few times. In addition to the Stroke weight you can also change other appearance properties for strokes. In the Properties panel click the word Stroke to show the Stroke panel. There are a lot of options for strokes in here like aligning the stroke to a path, adding a dash to it, adding arrowheads and a whole lot more. To align the stroke in a different way on the path, click Align Stroke to Outside. Aligning the stroke to the outside of a path will place the stroke outside of the shape giving you more room inside the shape. Maybe so you can add text inside the shape, for instance. Click Align Stroke to Center to center the stroke on the edge of the circle again. To apply a dash to selected artwork, select Dashed Line. You can create different types of dashes and dashes you create form a pattern that repeats along a path. For instance, change the dash to 7 pt then click in the gap field to the right of that. Illustrator CC applies a dash that’s 7 pt in length, and adds a gap of 7 pt, then repeats that along the length of the path. Click in the gap, type 9 then click in the next field to see the change in the shape out there. Now a 7 pt dash is followed by a 9 pt gap and that pattern is repeated on your shape. Now to make the stroke smaller change the stroke Weight to 1 pt. Press Esc to hide this panel. To remove the fill from the shape, click the Fill color in the Properties panel, make sure that the Swatches option is selected up top and then choose [None]. Now you can also add arrowheads to your artwork. Next, you’ll add arrowheads to the start and end of both of these lines. So, to select them both, with the Selection tool selected, click one of the lines in the middle, then Shift click the other to select both. To add arrowheads, click the word Stroke in the Properties panel on the right so you can see that Stroke panel again. Now you can add an arrowhead to the start of the path or the end of a path or both. Click the Arrowhead menu on the left to add an arrowhead to the start of the path or where you started drawing the path. You can see there are a lot to choose from. For this choose Arrow 14. By default, the Arrowhead is scaled at 100% of the stroke Weight. Change the stroke Weight to 3 pt and you'll see that the arrowhead gets bigger as well relative to the stroke Weight. If you want the arrowhead to be smaller or bigger than it is, you can change the Scale below each here. Now you'll add an arrowhead to the end of both of these lines. So, click the Arrowhead menu on the right and choose Arrow 18. If the arrowheads are on the wrong end of the path you can click this button to swap them. Make sure they look like this before you continue. Press Esc to hide the Stroke panel and also click in a blank area of the document, so you can deselect all of the artwork. Now that you know more about changing the appearance of strokes you can play with using different types of strokes in your artwork. For instance, you could create a stitching effect with a dashed line or even add arrowheads to an infographic or a diagram. 

There are so many ways to be creative with color in Illustrator CC including applying gradients to your artwork. A gradient is a blend between two or more colors like you see in this shape. To finish this icon artwork, you'll apply an existing gradient, then edit that gradient to suit your design needs. If you'd like to follow along you can open this document from the practice files for this tutorial. You'll start by filling this shape with a gradient. So, with the Selection tool selected click in this background shape to select it. To fill a shape with a gradient, click the Fill color in the Properties panel on the right and make sure that the Swatches are chosen so you can see the default color swatches you can use. Illustrator CC documents come with a series of default gradient swatches. Try clicking these gradient swatches one at a time to see how they affect the fill of the shape. Gradients can add interest, depth, and dimension to your artwork and in Illustrator CC, gradients can be applied to the fill or stroke of most objects. Make sure you finish by applying the gradient called White, Black here. Once you apply a gradient you can then edit the colors as well as how it appears in the selected artwork. To edit the gradient, click the Gradient Options button at the bottom of the panel to show the Gradient panel. You can move the Gradient panel around if you need by dragging the title bar at the top. In the Gradient panel there are a lot of options for editing your gradient, but you'll simply focus on editing the colors in this gradient. Since you applied the gradient to the fill of this shape you need to make sure you're editing the Fill in the Gradient panel and not the Stroke. So, click the Fill box so it's on top if it isn't already. Whichever is on top, the Fill or the Stroke, is what you change for the selected artwork. This Color bar shows you the overall color gradation you see in the artwork. These two little color circles which are called color stops represent the colors in the gradient. You should see white and black. Drag this white color stop to the right and watch what happens to the artwork when you release it. Dragging it closer to the second color means the transition from white to black in this case is much shorter. Drag that white color stop back to the left end. If you want to change the colors in a gradient, you can edit each color separately. Double click the white color stop to edit it so that you can see the saved color swatches that come with the document. Click the Swatches button, then select the color named Cream. To change the other color in the gradient, click in the Gradient panel to hide the swatches then double click the black color stop. Select the color swatch named Blue in the panel. With the color set you can now edit the gradient within this shape using the Gradient tool. Click the X at the top of the Gradient panel so you can close it. In the Tools panel on the left select the Gradient tool and you should see a bar appear across the fill or the shape. This shows the direction and length of the gradient fill. You can also see the two colors on either end, those color stops you saw in the Gradient panel. To change the direction and length of the gradient you'll drag across the object. So, starting toward the bottom of the shape pressing drag up to almost the top. After you release the mouse you just change the direction of the gradient and you also set the length of the gradient which is how long it takes to blend from the cream color to the blue color. So that you can deselect the artwork choose Select, Deselect. Adding gradients to artwork can open doors to new types of creativity. You should now be able to use gradients to do things like add depth through a button or create the perfect setting sun for a poster for instance. 

If you need to change the color of artwork maybe making all the colors in a poster lighter or creating different versions of a single logo, for instance, having to change each and every color can be time consuming and challenging. Using the Recolor Artwork feature in Illustrator CC you can do this simply and quickly. To follow along open this document from the practice files for this tutorial. To recolor artwork first you need to select the artwork you want to recolor, like this logo. In this case, you'll adjust the colors for the entire poster. To select everything in the poster choose Select, All. Now, you can recolor all of the selected content at once. In the Properties panel to the right of the document click the Recolor button to open the Recolor Artwork dialog box. Recolor Artwork in Illustrator CC can be a really powerful tool yet a relatively easy way to make large color changes to your artwork. Click the Edit tab so that you can see a color wheel. On the color wheel all of the colors that Illustrator CC found in the selected artwork represented by these little circles, the purple from the background, the green from the leaves and so on. You can change these colors in whatever way you want. For instance, you can change the colors independently. Drag this purple color into another part of the color wheel and notice how the purple in the artwork changes when you let go. If you need to move the dialog box out of the way you can drag it by the title bar at the top. You can also change all of the colors together, maybe to brighten them all or shift the colors in the same way. To change the colors back to what they were before you changed the purple color click this Eyedropper. That's really helpful if you experiment but don't want to go back to the original colors. To ensure that all of the colors change together when you drag one of them click this Link harmony colors button. Now drag the purple color again to another part of the color wheel. This time notice all of the colors are changing. Make sure you drag the purple, so it becomes a green and looks something like this. You can also adjust the brightness of the colors making them darker or lighter overall by dragging this Brightness slider left or right. Once you're happy with the colors in the poster click OK. Instead of editing the colors in artwork separately the Recolor Artwork feature gives you a powerful way to edit a series of colors quickly and visually. Now you can explore editing color in your own projects using Recolor Artwork, maybe creating several color versions of a logo.