- 1. Pick an Image
- 2. Create a New Illustrator Document
- 3. Remove Unwanted Swatches
- 4. Trace and Steal Those Swatches
- 5. Group Swatches Together as a Set
- 6. Use Live Color to Recolor Artwork
- 7. Explore Live Color and its Options
- 8. Save Your New Swatches for Exchange
- 9. View Swatches in Adobe Bridge CS3
- 10. Import Swatches ASE file into InDesign CS3
- 11. Get Your Swatches Online
11. Get Your Swatches Online
Playing with color can be a very distracting sport. Having a bunch of really cool tools also makes it so much more fun. Figure 14 shows the finished product in all its glory.

Figure 14 The radical, sick, and wicked results with stolen color and Adobe CS3
Once you’ve created a bunch of swatches or ASE files, you can easily share them via email or save them with client names. Even before the release of Adobe Creative Suite 3, Adobe created a really cool website on Adobe Labs that has the same LiveColor picker that we see in Illustrator today. You can still use it online to create color swatches that you can download and share.
The website is free and offers users the ability to create swatches using some fantastic tools. It also allows people to rate swatch libraries and also add comments. I think actually naming the swatches is the most fun. How does Morning Mist sound? Or, perhaps, Sydney Smog?