The Colour panel, picker and pipette in Vectornation by Zaweba

Colour is the first thing most people change after drawing a shape. In Vectornation by Zaweba the controls for it are the Colour panel, a pair of fill and stroke boxes under the tools, a pop-up picker, an opacity row and the pipette for picking colours from anywhere on screen.

Fill, stroke and the pop-up picker

Under the tools sits a fill and stroke pair. Fill is the colour inside a shape; stroke is the colour of its outline. Click one to make it active and the Colour panel edits that one. The pop-up picker opens right where you are working, which is often quicker than going to a panel when you only want to adjust one colour.

Colour modes

The Colour panel works in Grey, RGB, HSB, CMYK, Lab and web modes. Each suits a different job. RGB is the language of screens, so it suits web graphics, social media images and anything that will be viewed rather than printed. CMYK describes colour in printing inks, so use it for work going to a printer. HSB, short for hue, saturation and brightness, is the friendliest for choosing colours by feel: keep the hue and make it paler, or keep the brightness and shift the hue. Lab is built around how people see colour, which makes it handy for matching. Web mode keeps you to colours written the way web pages use them, and Grey is for single-colour work.

You can switch modes as you go. A common pattern is to choose colours by eye in HSB and then check or adjust their CMYK values before print.

The opacity row

Under the colour controls is an opacity row. In Vectornation every colour can be see-through on its own, separate from the opacity of the object that uses it. That lets you have a solid outline with a half-transparent fill, for example, without splitting the shape in two.

Picking colours with the pipette

The pipette picks colours from anywhere on screen, including other programs, and shows a magnifier while you aim. That last part matters more than it sounds. You can match a brand colour from a client's website open in your browser, take a shade from a photograph in an image viewer, or copy a colour from a PDF in another program, without exporting or screenshotting anything. The magnifier lets you hit the exact pixel you mean, rather than a blend at the edge of a shape.

Bear in mind that a colour picked from the screen is a screen colour. For print work, pick it, then look at its CMYK values and adjust if needed, or snap it to a colour in a spot colour book if the job uses one.

Making colour choices stick

Once you have a colour you like, save it as a swatch so you can apply it again exactly. Swatch groups, global colours and libraries keep a project's palette in order, and a global colour changes everywhere it is used when you edit it. For larger changes across a whole design, Recolour artwork and Edit colours are quicker than picking every shape by hand.

A good start is to choose your mode first, pick or mix a few colours, save them as swatches and use the swatches from then on. It keeps colour consistent through a drawing, which is one of the easiest ways to make work look professional.