Is there a plugin or a way to help me change colors easily?

[Animnation]

I'm wondering if there is a easier way to change a color in Illustrator.

Let's say I have multiple characters for whom I want to change their skin, eye, hair color multiple times. Is there plugin or something that could ease my work rather than selecting same fill color (this works but it could be easier) or recolor artwork (in this case this isn't really make it easier)

In an ideal world I would like to have 5 different squares with 5 different fills and anytime I would change the color of 1 square it would chnage the color of the whole artwork. 

[Doug A Roberts · Accepted solution]

Use global swatches.

https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/illustrator/how-to/global-color-swatch.html

[Kurt Gold]

In case you are not using global swatches, the Recolour Artwork capabilities are certainly way more powerful than the Select > Same commands.

Admittedly, the modal dialog based approach of Recolour Artwork may be a bit confusing and it may take some time to familiarise yourself with all the various settings and options.

[Silly-V]

"I would change the color of 1 square it would chnage the color of the whole artwork. "

How would it know what to change all the other colors to? The Recolor artwork dialog is enabled by defining color relationships in the artwork so that moving one color will change the other colors, but that's the best you can get. It could be accomplished with some kind of extension or plugin, but it would have to emulate a lot of what Recolor artwork already does in that regard.

[Inventsable]

Swatch UI is pretty awful though and Recolor Artwork isn't straightforward to change specific color values. You could emulate what After Effects does with Color Expression Controls pretty easily via tags, then have a color picker which triggers all colors of this tag value to change to the new value

[Inventsable · Accepted solution]

I had a go at this. Might be easier to see in the HD gfycat though:

It's pretty barebones, inspired of After Effects expression controls and the UI is very simple, but initial tests show it working. The Github repo with download link and install instructions is here.

A few notes:

• Fills and Strokes must be separate otherwise the panel doesn't know which color to overwrite
• It can only access one fill/stroke per object. If you have complex appearances with multiple strokes within the Appearance panel per object, we can't access that via scripting
• There is no duplicate tag name detection. Once you generate the menu, it's best to tab through the inputs and give each a unique name. They can share names if they aren't the same type (fill/stroke) but if you have two fills with the exact same name, the panel will overwrite all associated items with the last modified color
• Certain special characters aren't supported in controller names. If you notice it not doing anything when you change color, make sure you have valid characters -- try to use only alphanumeric (a-zA-Z0-9 or space) characters and not things like dashes, periods, dollar signs, etc.
• There are extended options in the right click context menu, like being able to auto-launch on panel mount or stop scanning the document for your selection length

I didn't test this much and I have no idea if it's going to hold up in large, complex documents. But it should retain all the controls even when you close and reopen the same document in Illustrator so long as you save this document after generating the menu.