Today's quick design tip– how to change colors in your surface design using Adobe Illustrator— is brought to you by Spoonflower help team member Theresa! 

Some of our favorite Spoonflower design challenges are those where designers are asked to use a particular color palette to create their designs. Individual artists' interpretation of the contest theme and use of the color palette create suprisingly unique and creative fabric designs. 

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Top 10 designs from the Bedtime Design Challenge


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Top 10 Designs from the Spring Floral Cheater Quilt Block Design Challenge

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Top 10 designs from the Film Noir Design Challenge

As a designer, there will be dozens of occasions when you may want to change a specific color in your design. This tutorial shows you how to easily change the hex code of a color using Adobe Illustrator for a Spoonflower limited color palette contest. Once you have this trick nailed down, I promise you will use it all the time for many different applications!

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Be sure your file is set to the RGB color mode (File> Document Color Mode> RGB). When you’ve changed your colors and the design is complete, export your file as a PNG at 150 dpi before uploading to Spoonflower.

Try out your new color-swapping skills by entering one of our upcoming contests, the Surfing color palette-restricted design challenge! Entries are due June 3rd. Find out more about entering Spoonflower design challenges and other upcoming themes here. 

Surf palette

About Our Guest Author

TRIn addition to being a part of the Spoonflower help team, Theresa keeps busy working on freelance graphic design projects, loving on her mutt, Olive, needlecrafting and making floury messes in the kitchen. Check out some of Theresa's surface designs in her Spoonflower shop.