Color, gradients & swatches
Fill, stroke & background color
Almost every object you draw has two colors: the fill inside it and the stroke around its edge. Your canvas has a background behind everything. This page shows you where those three fields live and how the color picker works.
Where color lives
Color is set in the Properties panel on the right side of the studio. Select any object and the panel shows a color row for it. There are three fields you'll reach for again and again:
- Fill — the interior color of the object
- Stroke — the outline color, with a Stroke width control beside it
- Background — the fill of the canvas itself
Each field shows a small swatch of the current color. Click a swatch to open the color picker.
The Fill field
Fill is the color that paints the inside of an object. Text, shapes, the group frame and the image backdrop all expose a Fill. Click the Fill swatch to open the picker and choose a color.
When nothing is applied, the field reads None — the object is unfilled and you see straight through it. Setting a fill back to None is how you make a shape a hollow outline that shows only its stroke.
The Stroke field
Stroke paints a line around the edge of an object. Click the Stroke swatch to set its color, and use the Stroke width field next to it to set how thick that line is.
A stroke with a width of zero paints nothing, no matter what color it's set to. If a stroke color isn't showing up, check that its width is above zero.
Background
The Background field sets the fill of the canvas — the artboard your design sits on. A related Workspace background setting controls the darker area around the canvas, which is just for your comfort while you work and never exports.
When you want the canvas to have no color at all — so it exports with a see-through background — choose the Transparent option. This matters for logos, stickers and anything you'll place over another background later.
The color picker
Clicking any color swatch opens the picker popover. It has the same anatomy everywhere:
- A saturation/value square — drag to pick brightness and intensity.
- A hue slider — the vertical rainbow bar that sets the base color.
- A hex input for typing an exact value like
#1E88E5. - Channel fields — RGB in a screen document, or CMYK ink values in a print document (see below).
- An Opacity slider for the color's transparency.
If you select several objects with different colors and open the picker, the field reads Mixed — a reminder that you're about to overwrite more than one value at once.
Picking a color from screen
The eyedropper button in the picker is labelled Pick color from screen. Click it, then click any pixel on your canvas to lift that exact color into the field. It's the fastest way to match a color already in your design — sample a color from a placed logo, then apply it to a headline so the two agree perfectly.
Reusing colors
You rarely want to mix every color from scratch. The top of the picker has three source tabs plus a row of defaults:
| Source | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Brand | Color tokens from the brand kit pinned to this design |
| Document | Colors already used somewhere in this design |
| Library | Named swatches you've saved for reuse |
| Presets | A built-in row of default colors to get started |
The Brand tab keeps a project on-palette without hunting for hex codes — it draws from your brand kit. The Document tab is handy for staying consistent: it collects the colors you've already used so you can reapply them with one click. The Library tab surfaces your saved swatches, covered in the Swatches article.
Opacity is per-color
The Opacity slider in the picker sets the alpha of that fill or stroke only. That's different from the object-level opacity and blend mode in the Properties panel, which fade or blend the whole object. Use color opacity for a translucent fill; use object opacity to fade an entire element, stroke and all.
RGB or CMYK fields
The channel fields in the picker follow your document's color mode. A screen (RGB) document shows red, green and blue channels; a print (CMYK) document shows cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink values instead, and soft-proofs them on screen. If you're printing, work in CMYK from the start so what you pick is close to what the press produces. See RGB vs CMYK color modes for the full picture.
Where to go next
Ready to go beyond flat color? Named, reusable colors — including print-critical inks — live in Spot colors & print separations. And if you're building for print, RGB vs CMYK color modes explains why your channel fields look the way they do.