How to Work with Logos That Use Gradients

[00:00:02]

Hey logo designers, today I want to show you how you can work with gradients inside of Logo Package Express. So if you set a logo that has a gradient inside of Logo Package Express and you make print logos, you're going to get a dialog box pop up. And that dialog box is going to tell you that Logo Package Express does not convert gradients or patterns into Pantone and that you'll need to manually recolor the logos or exclude them from your logo package.

[00:00:29]

So I'm going to show you how you can do both of those things. I'll click continue and I'll go to the settings page and go to the color tab. If I uncheck uncoated and uncheck coated and then press "Make Print Logos," the options for Pantone are completely excluded and you don't have to worry about recoloring anything at all. This is a really great solution if you don't plan on including Pantone logos in your logo package.

[00:00:54]

Option number two is to manually color the Pantone artwork. And I can show you a quick and easy way to do that. I'm going to use the direct select tool, which is a on the keyboard, and make a selection of the gradient in all of the coated artboards. That's the inverted and the full color color logo.

[00:01:13]

Now I'm going to use a little known feature of Illustrator to recolor these gradients. I'm going to go up to the control panel and click this color wheel icon. This opens up the recolor artwork panel. If you don't see the color wheel in your control panel, you can always come up to Edit > Edit Colors and then choose "Recolor Artwork" from the fly out.

[00:01:33]

Back on the recolor artwork panel, we're going to go down to the bottom next to the sliders for color. There is this little grid icon and it says "Limit the color group to colors in a swatch library." We're going to open that, go to color books. And because we have chosen coated, we're going to go to solid coated. This is going to recolor the artwork, but limit it to the color book that we've selected.

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So I will click "Ok." Now it has recolored these two pieces of artwork and you'll see that we have Pantone swatches out on the panel now.

[00:02:05]

Now I'm going to do the same thing for uncoated. I'll select both of the uncoated options. I will this time open by going to Edit > Edit Colors > Recolor Artwork. And I'm going to limit to solid uncoated and press, ok. And now all of my logos are recolored and ready to be exported. These are the two ways that you can work with gradients inside of Logo Package Express. Thanks for watching.