Illustrator CC: how do I change the artboard colour?

[cdarklock]

This is frustrating.

No matter how I set the interface preferences, when I make a new artboard, that artboard is white.

The brain-dead workaround to this is to put a rectangle the colour I want on a locked background layer and make it the same size as my artboard, but this turns "Shift+O, drag" into "Shift+O, drag, M, drag, set desired fill colour, deselect rectangle, restore previous fill colour and tool and selection."

It seems like there should be an interface option somewhere that lets me set the colour of new artboards, but the only guidance I can find on setting the artboard colour says to use "simulate coloured paper." Simulating coloured paper is not setting the colour of your artboard. It is simulating the way ink always lets some of the paper colour show through.

I do not want my artboard to show through. I simply want it to be a different colour. When I press Shift+O and drag out a new artboard, I want that artboard to be the same colour. If I decide I would like a different colour, I want to change a single setting somewhere and have the colours of all artboards in the document change at once.

I cannot find any setting for this in the interface. Am I missing something, or is it just not there?

[avperth]

This really should be in the artboard options rather than hidden away in preferences. Maybe user would double-click artboard with artboard tool to access options then set a simulated background color. Or maybe some floating popup when selecting an artboard that allows you to quickly select a color from library as the simulated background. That way you can have a mix of different artboard colors and not have to worry about drawing rectangles, sizing and aligning them, sending them to back and locking. And it wouldn't affect the default setup of blank artboards as the user would have to deliberately change it via artboard tool. The only issue might be that on export, you could forget which artboard colors are simulated and end up with a transparent graphic. But you could potentially also have some quick option like "fill colors to all selected artboards" that would generate artboard-sized rectangles based on the selected simulated artboard colors (or a newly selected color) on each artboard, then auto-send the layers to back and lock. Or maybe some option to toggle all simulated backgrounds on or off so you can quickly see which artboards are which. But I don't know the exact mechanics of Illustrator, or how other users might use it, so perhaps there is a reason it has been setup in this way.

I know it's not a long process to draw rectangle, size to artboard, send to back and lock, but I usually end up doing this so often that it really should be just a quick artboard option by now. My workflow is organised such that I usually keep each color variation of a design on a separate artboard anyway, hence why a quicker way of generating artboard colors would be handy. And most of the time, I need what I'm designing to work on a variety of background colors, so I will usually always have several variations on separate artboards. Usually black, white, and two color options.

[Ton Frederiks]

You may want to add your feature request here:

https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/333657-illustrator-desktop-feature-requests/suggestions/313...