New bullets feature - change bullet color

[designabc123]

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

Thanks in advance,

Liviu

[Anna Lander]

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! 🙂

[designabc123]

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

[Anshul_Saini · Accepted solution]

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

[Marley C.]

Actually, MS-Word has more bullet formatting than this. You can in fact change the color of bullets. Not trying to compare apple to oranges here, just pointing it out.

Thak you for the screen recording, very helpful. 

[Anshul_Saini]

Hi @Marley C.,

Thanks for reaching out and upvoting & commenting on UserVoice. We have already raised a feature request from our side as well to enhance the number & bullets customization. The product team has reviewed the request. More upvotes are appreciated and will help prioritize it.

I am glad to hear that the screen recording helped.

Please feel free to reach out if you run into any other questions or issues in the future. We'd be happy to help.

Thanks,

Anshul Saini

[Alexey Rublev]

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

[corb266896464z5v]

Thanks, Alexey! Works, neat trick. 🙂

[Sorontar]

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.

[Monika Gause]

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

[Anna Lander]

could you please tell us a bit more about what you wanted to get and what happened? It would be helpful for other users.

[Marley C.]

The user is having the same issue with everyone else in this thread. The new bullet feature is not very flexible, and does not allow you any formatting options like color, size or shape. 

[K2planks]

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. 

[designabc123]

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. 

[K2planks]

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! 😞

[Daniela711]

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.

[Daniela711]

...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.

[Monika Gause · Accepted solution]

Please vote for this uservoice feature request: https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/333657-illustrator-desktop-feature-requests/suggestions/455...

[MissFina Catalina]

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 

[Robert25865735hm7i]

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.