Copying Artboards with Independent Swatches in Adobe Illustrator: How to Easily Change Colors

[Yolanda5DB8]

Hey, fellow designers! I have a question about Adobe Illustrator. I want to create copies of my artboards while having the ability to change colors independently on each copied artboard. Is there a way to do this? I'd like to duplicate my artboard and have separate swatches for each copy, so I can easily switch up the colors without affecting the original artboard. Any tips or guidance on how to achieve this in Illustrator would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

[Andy Tells Things]

You can use Global Colors 🙂 after copying the artboard with the artwork, select all the vectors you'd like to recolor, open the Swatches Panel and click on the little folder at the bottom of the panel. This will create a folder inside the Swatches Panel and place all the colors present in the selected artwork inside. Make sure to check "Convert Process to Global" on the window that pops up when you click on the folder icon. When you change a global color swatch, every object that has this swatch applied will be updated instantly (also, you can see that a swatch is a global color by the white triangle in it). Now, even though both artworks share the same colors, the one you created the swatches will be using global colors, so you can edit the global color swatches and the other artwork will remain unchanged. Just be careful, if you copy the artwork with the global colors, it'll keep the same swatches, so always duplicate the artwork that is not using global colors.

[Yolanda5DB8]

Thank you! This makes sense but what do you do if your first artwork has already set its color to global colors? Because if I do this, the colors of both artworks change 🥲.

[Andy Tells Things]

If you're happy with the colors, you can delete the global color swatches for the first illustration. Or, you can always use separate documents instead of separate artboards, but that may not be what you're after. Other than that, I can only think of manually selecting colors and changing them. An easier way to do that would be to group the entire illustration (Ctrl/Cmd +G), then isolate it (Right Click Menu > Isolate Selected Group). By grouping and isolating you can use the Magic Wand Tool (Y) to select objects based on fill, stroke and even transparency or blending mode. I recommend also opening the Magic Wand Panel to adjust these parameters (Window > Magic Wand).

[Andy Tells Things]

Oops, I ended up not explaining why the grouping and isolating. This way you avoid selecting objects from the original illustration. Though, I don't know how that would play since you're already using global swatches.

[MikeGondek]

1. Create your oringal layout pn page 1
2. On artbaords window drag page 1 to the new artbaord icon to duplicate
3. Drag a selection frame over page 1 and command 2 to lock page 1 items
4. Go to page 2 select an item in the color you want to change
5. Use Select >> Same >> Fill color, Change to your new color and repeat.

You can then repeat keeping locked the pages locked that are final.

In Screenshot below page 1 was manually locked., and changed the color of the 2 top paths on page 2.