Restyling with colour and font schemes in Publish

Changing the whole look of a publication should not mean recolouring every box and refonting every heading. When a design is built on shared colours and styles, you can swap the lot in one go. Publish by Zaweba does that with 16 colour schemes and 12 font schemes.

Both are in the Format menu, or in the Properties panel when nothing is selected. They restyle everything that uses the document colours and the heading and body styles.

What a colour scheme changes

A colour scheme replaces the set of document colours. Every shape, line, panel, piece of text and background that uses those named colours changes to the scheme's colours. A newsletter in navy and gold can become forest green and cream in a click, with its contrast and balance kept because the colours are swapped as a set.

This is what makes it fast to make several versions of a design. A charity might use one scheme for its spring appeal flyer and another for the autumn one, keeping the same layout. A cafe might try three schemes on a new menu and pick the one that suits the shop.

What a font scheme changes

A font scheme changes the fonts of the heading and body styles. Headlines and subheadings take the scheme's heading font, running text takes its body font, and every paragraph using those styles follows along. Font pairing is a skill, and a scheme hands you a pair that work together without needing to know why.

A formal pairing suits certificates and reports; a friendlier one suits a playgroup newsletter. Trying a few schemes is a quick way to see what tone a publication should have.

Building pages that respond

Schemes only reach what is linked to them. Text with a heading or body style changes; text formatted by hand in a particular font stays as it is. Shapes filled with a document colour change; a shape given a one-off colour does not.

So build with schemes in mind from the start. Use the document palette for fills, lines, text colours and page backgrounds. Use the heading and body styles, and base your other styles on them, rather than formatting text directly. A publication built this way can be restyled in seconds months later. One built with hand picked colours needs to be gone through box by box.

Templates are a good example. They are built in the document's colours, so trying a colour scheme on a template shows off the range of looks it can take.

A sensible way to choose

Get the content in first. Choosing a scheme on an empty page is guesswork; on a page with your real headline, photos and text, you can see what works. Pictures matter in particular, because a scheme that suits your photos looks far better than one that fights them.

Then try schemes quickly, one after another, without changing anything else. Narrow it to two or three, and look at them at actual size, or export a picture of each page to compare. Once you have chosen, small adjustments to individual document colours can fine tune it.

If your organisation has fixed colours, set them as the document colours and leave the colour scheme alone, but a font scheme can still be useful for finding a good pairing.

Mistakes to avoid

The common one is hand formatting that does not follow the scheme, which leaves odd boxes in the old colour or font. If something stays unchanged after a scheme change, check whether it uses a document colour or a style, and switch it over. The other is changing schemes late, after a print shop proof, without checking every page again.

Colour and font schemes in Publish by Zaweba are a fast way to explore and to restyle, as long as the publication is built on document colours and styles.