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designabc123
designabc123
Participating Frequently
August 22, 2022
Answered

New bullets feature - change bullet color

Great to see the bullet feature finally being added to Illustrator, but how do I chnage the bullet color?

 

Thanks in advance,

Liviu

    Alexey Rublev
    Alexey RublevCorrect answer
    Participant
    October 31, 2023

    Use Insert discretionary hyphen ( Shift + Ctrl + - ) between the bullet and the first letter of the line. This symbol takes up no space

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    23 replies

    Zach310633985yuk
    Participant
    January 21, 2025

    So I know this is an old post, but I ran into this issue and found a somewhat easy work around. Reading others answers and trying stuff

    Get your points the color you want. Which makes your text that color

    Put a space before the text and and at the end of your bullet point text, then highlight text and make it the color you want. I know the proper way is to learn text & paragraph styles. But when your up against a deadline it really helps. Hope this helps others like it did for me.

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    Monika Gause
    Community Expert
    Monika GauseCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    January 21, 2025

    paragraph styles will not help you. What you need is not a space, but a soft hyphen. That doesn't ake up space of its own.

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      MissFina Catalina
      Participant
      August 3, 2023

      Hi, as a workaround I duplicate the layer and change the color of the font on the top layer to the desired bullet/numbering color then delete the text line per line keeping only the bullets/numbers so that you can see the text of the under layer with the desired font color 

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        Robert25865735hm7i
        Participant
        September 20, 2023

        I am in utter disbelief that this is not a thing.  The functionality should mirror that of InDesign.

         

        My work around is to lay out my entire document and then go back and select each bullet line and "convert to type" so i can manually change the bullet color.

         

        I wish I could just use Sketch for this project but since they are animated banners, our animation team needs the files in Photoshop or Illustrator.

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        Daniela711
        Daniela711
        Participant
        February 21, 2023

        There is no feature to change the style or color of the bullet in Illustrator. However, you can add a space between the bullet and the text, and change the color of the"space" to the color you want. This way the bullet will change the color and the text will remain black.

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          Daniela711
          Daniela711
          Participant
          February 21, 2023

          ...and there is no way to add custom bullets. It would be nice if someone would make us a favour and give us these features for bullets in AI.

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          Monika Gause
          Community Expert
          Monika GauseCommunity Expert
          Community Expert
          February 21, 2023

          Please vote for this uservoice feature request: https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/333657-illustrator-desktop-feature-requests/suggestions/45550903-allow-formatting-of-bullets-numbers-in-lists

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            K2planks
            Participant
            October 19, 2022

            I agree with the other posts...having bulleted lists, with no way to change the bullet color, is basicaly useless. Just because I feel that a black bullet may be fine...my client may not. If I need to change the bulets from black, to something else, after the fact...I am bassicly starting over, for something that should be a basic function. I can not use this feature till there is come consistent control over various aspects of the bullets. 

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              designabc123
              designabc123Author
              Participating Frequently
              October 19, 2022

              Indeed! They say that this is how other programs operate and is expected behaviour, but:

              - first of all, does Adobe compare its programs with Word and PowerPoint (which have horrible UI by the way)

              - secondly, you can actually change the bullet colour in PowerPoint

              Maybe next year's major update will fix it, as the one we got today doesn't. 

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              K2planks
              Participant
              October 19, 2022

              Yeah, I can already do this in InDesign using styles...however you can not apply styles to bulets in Illustrator. Seems like they missed something here. Come on! 😞

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                Sorontar
                Inspiring
                September 27, 2022

                Can't even change bullet shape or size. I have tried twice to use this bullet feature. Both times it fails to meet my needs. Back to the old method.

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                  Monika Gause
                  Community Expert
                  Monika GauseCommunity Expert
                  Community Expert
                  September 27, 2022

                  Please add your vote to Uservoice in order to make it better.

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                    Anna Lander
                    Anna Lander
                    Inspiring
                    August 22, 2022

                    Well, Illustrator is still not as good with text layout as InDesign 🙂 and does not have the Character styles for bullets.
                    The only way that I could find for a moment is 
                    1. Create the character style with the needed color.

                    2. Create a Paragraph style for the bulleted list and apply it to the text.

                    3. The most interesting: the bullet takes the character style from the first letter of the paragraph. So, if you add, say, the Hair Space at the start of the paragraph and apply your char style to this space, you will get the bullet with the needed color! 🙂

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                      designabc123
                      designabc123Author
                      Participating Frequently
                      August 23, 2022

                      Thanks, Anna!

                       

                      Indeed, I noticed that the bullet colour is taken from the first character and I did the coloured space trick. The issue with this is that. if the list item goes on two lines, the second line is not perfectly aligned with the top. I could add the same space on the second line, but then I need to add a hard return, and completely defeats the purpuse of automatic bullets.

                       

                      So, to me, this new feature is incomplete. For one line list items it was easy enough before to add the bullet character manualy. Automatic flowing multiple line list items was where I was missing this feature. And seing how 90% of the time I like to have my bullets in a different colour then the text, I don't think I will use this new feature until it gets an option for bullet colour. I'd imagine it would be easy enough, as a bullet options panel already exists. They could just add a colour option in there.

                       

                      Fingers crossed that will come in the next update.

                       

                      Thanks,

                      Liviu

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                        Anshul_Saini
                        Community Manager
                        Anshul_SainiCommunity Manager
                        Community Manager
                        August 23, 2022

                        Hi @designabc123,

                         

                        Thanks for reaching out. This is expected behaviour, not in just Illustrator but in other third-party apps such as MS-Word, Pages, etc. We have logged an internal request with the product team to enhance this feature, which is currently under review.

                        Would you mind upvoting this UserVoice and adding your comment there? This way, you will get updates related to this feature request and help prioritise it.

                         

                        However, in the meantime, you may use the workaround suggested by Anna, and I am also attaching a small recording of a workaround as well for reference.

                         

                        Regards,

                        Anshul Saini

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