Global Colors in Affinity Designer - Digital Art and Design

In this last tutorial in the series, we will be working with the Global Colors. We can use Global Colors to make subtle changes in the color of the wood. Or, you can go crazy with color to make a bright and fun background.

What are Global Colors
Global Colors are a special type of color in Affinity Designer. It's not the color itself that is special but the special way you use Global Colors in your project. Global Colors are very similar to Symbols. You can set a fill or stroke color as a Global Color and you can use Global Colors in several color modes from RGB to Tint. Once you assign a Global Color to an object or objects, you can quickly change the color of those objects just by changing the Global Color itself.

As you know, we have assigned all of the colors used in our project as Global Colors. Now we can use these Global Colors to create variations of our wood paneling background. Let's start by changing the color of the paneling to a more saturated brown color.

In the Swatches panel, open the WoodTexture Document palette (see screenshot).

Right-click on the Base Color swatch and choose Edit Fill. In the pop-up box, change the color code to DAB592.

Right-click on the Panel Lines swatch and choose Edit Fill. Set the color to 73130C.

Repeat these steps for the Filler Texture swatches, changing the swatches to the colors below.

Now that we know how to use Global Colors, we can continue to create variations of our paneling. Use the colors below to make a light pink paneling (see screenshot).

Note: What if you wanted to use the Global Colors feature as we have above. But you need to change the color of one or more objects, while maintaining the global color for all the other objects. Well you can do that using the Color panel or the Context toolbar. You just need to select the object and manually change the color in one of the panels.

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Screenshots used by permission of Serif (Europe) Ltd. This article is not endorsed by Serif Ltd.