Do you want to change the color of your artboard in Illustrator? It can be tricky to know how to do it, but we’re here to help! In this blog post, we will walk you through the steps necessary to change the color of your artboard. It’s a quick and easy process, and you’ll be able to customize your artboard to match your specific needs. Let’s get started.
What Is Artboard?
An artboard is essentially a canvas where you can create your designs. It’s the area where you’ll be working on your illustrations, and it’s important to have a clear understanding of how it works before you start changing its color. The artboard is what will determine the final dimensions of your design, so it’s important to know how to change its color correctly.
Why Might You Want To Change Color?
Working with a white background may be hard, especially when you’re developing a logo or icons and want to see how they’ll look in lighter colors against a dark background. You could always pull your current project off the artboard to examine how it looks against the dark gray background, but if you want to test how it looks against a different hue?
Change Artboard Color In Illustrator
To change the color of the artboard in Illustrator, go to the Document Settings screen and tick the “Simulate Color Paper” option, then adjust the color of the grid to whatever color you want your artboard to be.
Unfortunately, there is no method to alter the color of the artboard directly in Illustrator, but there is a workaround that will allow us to achieve the same result, which we will look at in this session.
The advantage of this workaround is that it eliminates the requirement to create a new document. You may use this on any document you’re working on right now. Follow the below-mentioned steps to do so.
Open Document
We’ll need to visit the Document Setup menu to continue with this solution. To do so, hit Alt + Control + P on your keyboard, or use the toolbar option to go to File > Document Setup.
The Document Setup menu is a simple menu that lets you choose things like your chosen units of measurement, document bleed size (if applicable), and whether or not you want to use an opacity checkerboard on your artboard.
Change Grid Color
All you have to do now is adjust two of the settings in the Document Setup menu.
To begin, check the “Simulate Color Paper” box and ensure that the preset beneath it is set to [Medium Resolution]. This color paper simulation is what allows you to modify the color of the artboard in Illustrator to anything you desire.
Simply click on the top color stripe adjacent to the checkerboard grid, and change the color to whatever you want your artboard to be. When you click on the stripe, you’ll be given the option of selecting a color. This is the color that will be used to fill your artboard.
Unfortunately, there is no way to specify a Hexadecimal color code, so if you have something special in mind, you’ll need RGB or HSL numbers for your color. Otherwise, you may manually choose a color using the UI.
When you’ve decided on a color, click OK in the color menu, then OK in the Document Setup menu to save your changes and exit the program. The color you choose to fill your artboard should now be visible.
If your PC is anything like mine, the color of your artboard has probably remained white despite changing the hue. However, this is simply a screen rendering issue. All you have to do now is zoom in and out quickly to reset it, and your new artboard color should appear.
Hold Alt and roll the mouse wheel up and down to zoom in and out.
Reset Artboard Color
If you want to return to a conventional white fill, go back to the Document Setup menu, select the “Simulate Color Paper” option, and click OK to save and closeout.
Precautions and Advice
There are a few things to keep in mind while changing the color of the artboard in Illustrator.
For starters, you’re not actually altering the color of any of your design work or the document itself, much like changing the canvas color in Inkscape. All you’re doing is altering the look of the artboard in your workstation.
If you save your artboard as a PNG, the fill color will not be seen in your exported design, just like when the artboard is white. In other words, regardless of the color of your artboard, exporting a graphic to PNG will result in a document with a transparent backdrop.
If you want to export the artboard color with your graphic, you’ll need to manually draw a rectangle, fill it with the color you want to use, and place it beneath your graphic.
Conclusion
Although it’s great that Illustrator lets you alter the color of the artboard, it would be much better if it was designated more clearly. Users shouldn’t have to tinker with random options or hunt for workarounds for standard features in rivals like Inkscape and Affinity Designer. This, hopefully, will change in the near future.
Simply leave a comment below if you have any queries or if any aspect of this lecture was confusing. Thank you for stopping by, as usual! Visit our website to learn more about Adobe Illustrator and other editing tools.
