- Alright, so once you assemble
a sufficient number of swatches,
the challenge becomes managing them,
which is why, among other things,
Illustrator allows you to search your swatches by name
and you can do so from the Color Picker dialog box.
To get there, go to the active attribute
at the bottom of the toolbox and double click on it
and that will bring up the Color Picker dialog box.
Then click on the Color Swatches button
and you'll see a list of swatches that are saved
inside of this document and it's important to note
that swatches are indeed saved along with the document.
Now, in addition to this long list of swatches
over here on the far left side of the dialog box,
we also have this column of tiny little slices
which represent the colors as well
and so you can drag the sliders up and down this column
in order to switch to a different swatch
in the left hand list.
The other thing you can do is click down here
in the search field and so, for example,
let's say I want to take a look
at all the swatches that have no black in them.
If I enter the letter K then I'm going to see
all of the swatches with the letter K in their name,
including just one of my global swatches, Sky blue.
The rest are automatically named swatches
that are created automatically
when you make a new print document.
Then if I want to rule out any K values except zero,
I go ahead and add =0 like so
and that goes ahead and takes the CMYK
red and yellow and so forth off the top of the list
and it also eliminates any automatically named colors
that contain black
and we also have fewer slices in this column right here,
so notice now that we just have a relative handful.
Now, you could also, of course, search for
a specific swatch.
For example, if I wanted to find Seafoam
I could enter the letter S
and then I'll see all of my swatches that have
an S character in them.
There's only four of them, as you can see here
and, as a result, we only have four
big color slices in this central column.
Now let's say you want to search
for just those fonts that you've created
and named yourself.
Well, there isn't really any way to do that per se,
you don't have wildcard characters and that sort of thing,
but you do have the letter e, and you may wonder
why in the world I would mention that.
Well, let me show you.
I'll go ahead and cancel out here
and I'll switch over to this rather compulsive document
that lists a bunch of common color names.
Now, these are by no means all the color names, of course,
but they are a representative few.
Now I'll go ahead and scroll down
to the bottom of the Layers panel
and I'll turn off this layer of colors
and then I'll turn on this layer right here
and what we're seeing is 24 out of 26
of the letters in the alphabet,
I'm not listing X or J, which are extremely rare characters,
but all the other characters in their order of popularity
in the English language,
and so the most popular letter in English is E
and then second is T, A, O and so forth.
Among my list of color names right here,
it runs a little differently.
What I found was I had 24 occurrences of the letter E,
eight of T and then more of A,
lots of N and R and so forth,
but some of these characters I ruled out
because R, for example, is used in
any RGB definition, C is used in any
CMYK definition and so forth,
and so, if you're just trying
to find colors that you've named,
it's very possible that they're going to contain
the letter E, and then what I did next was basically
rank these letters by how popular they are
and I gave them little awards here, so
the blue ribbon goes to E,
the second place red ribbon goes to A,
usually a third place ribbon is white, but
that's not going to work for this document,
so, anyway, you get a sense of what I've done here
and I've crossed out the letters
that you don't want to search for.
Then I figured out, alright, all of these colors
are covered by a search for the letter E
and then these guys with the red letter As,
they are covered by a search for A,
and you can't do a search for E and A by the way,
you just have to do independent searches,
but between E and A, we've covered just about every color.
If we move on to searching for N,
then we rule out everybody but gold
and then finally, just for fun,
I was telling you this was a compulsive document,
I've gone ahead and highlighted
all those award winning letters
inside of our various color names
and so if I go ahead and switch back
to my calendar document and I double click
on the fill in order to bring up the Color Picker dialog box
and then click on the Color Swatches button,
I can now enter the letter E and I will,
not coincidentally, find every single one
of my custom colors, along with
the default colors CMYK Red, Yellow,
Green, Blue and Magenta,
the only one we're not seeing is Cyan
because it does not contain the letter E.
And that's how you search through your swatches,
specifically here inside the Color Picker dialog box.