In this lesson, you are going to learn about the Adobe Color website and how it can be integrated with Adobe InDesign. I have gone to the Color website by typing in color.adobe.com into my browser. When you first go to color.adobe.com, the Adobe Color website, you're going to get a message about what's new. We can click through the areas over here on the left that tell us the new features that have been updated in Adobe Color. I'm just gonna close out of that. And we're gonna talk a little bit about the three main areas of the Adobe Color website. Now, up across the top in the center, we are in the Create area. In a minute, we're gonna look at Explore and then Trends. But in the Create area, this is where you can go to learn a little bit about working with color and color harmony rules. What you can do in the Create area is if you have a base color, you have a color that you're working with that you're not quite sure what other colors might work with it, you can put that color, I'm gonna just scroll down here, into this base color area. So I'm just gonna click and drag on this a little bit, and create kind of a, want a seafoamy, kind of a light seafoamy green. There we go. This is my base color. Just gonna make it a little bit lighter. There we go. That's a better one. This is my base color. Over here on the left, we have the ability to see an analogous color grouping, a monochromatic color grouping, a triad, complementary, split complementary. These are all different color harmony rules that pick out colors on the color wheel based on the different positions on the color wheel that will work well with our initial color. So you can look through and see if there is a color harmony rule that you like that you can use. So, I kind of like what's going on here with the square one. This is the best part. I'm just gonna click on this library over here and choose my KC library, my Knowledge City library. This library here is connected to my creative cloud library, and I can click on the Save button, and it just saved that theme to my library, my creative cloud library. Now up across the top here, we also have the ability to extract from an image or extract from a gradient, but these next tools are really pretty cool. The accessibility tools. Now, when you are creating, it's very important to be aware of how people see your colors. And so, Adobe Color has the ability over here on the left to help us choose what colors are color blind safe. And if we have any colors that might look too similar to someone who is color blind, we can then go in and choose different colors for that specific color. Now, the other thing that Adobe has added is the contrast checker. And so what this does is this shows us how colors will work together when they are placed text on top. And so, you can put in your own text color here. So if I wanted to choose, say a yellow color and I wanted to put it on kind of a green background, you can see how, when I do that, I get three fails because there isn't enough contrast in my colors. It would be best if I chose a different color for each of these, gonna just make it a little bit darker. And so then, I can see how I have white on this dark green background will pass for smaller text, medium-sized text and icons and graphics. So within the Create area, we have the ability to work with the contrast checker, the color blind safe checker. And we have the ability to create our own groups of colors with the color wheel. Sometimes you don't have that color to start off with. So that's where the Explore area comes in. I'm gonna click on the Explore up at the top. And with the Explore area, we have the ability to scroll through lots of different colors that Adobe has come up with on their own. And if you like a color, you can just click on one of these icons. You can appreciate it. You can download it as a JPEG. Or you can add it to your library. So I just added that color group to my KC library. So we have lots of different colors in here. The third area that we can go to is the Trends area. Now in the Trends area, Adobe has found images from either Behance or Adobe Stock, and they have pulled out color themes from those designs or photographs. And you can go through and see what colors they're coming up with. Now, if you have a project, I recently had a project where I had to create a logo for a company, and it was a design and build company. So I went into the architecture area and I clicked on this View More button. And I looked through some of the color schemes, the color themes that they had in here to try and come up with colors that I thought would match the personality of the contractor that I was working with. And again, when you find a color theme that you like, there is a download as JPEG or add to library. So I'm just gonna click on that, Add To Library. From my libraries, I can see in the KC that the color themes that I just added are listed here in my KC library. Now, if I open up InDesign and go to my CC Libraries, and in that KC library, if I scroll down, there are the colors that I just added. So using the Adobe Color website allows you to create different color themes that you can then bring into InDesign. So in this lesson, you learned how to use the Adobe Color website and how to save themes to bring them into Adobe InDesign.
