Chapter 5. Using Color

IN THIS CHAPTER

The Color Mixer

The Color Swatches Panel

Summary

Sample Questions

One of the most important aspects of good design is the appropriate use of color. Color plays a powerful role in setting the mood of a presentation. A company's brand is defined mostly by color. Color can indicate different sections throughout a presentation, and add emphasis to specific areas.

Manipulating color within Macromedia Flash MX is a snap. A precise color palette to select from helps keep your presentation consistent and unified. Flash provides four main tools that help you work with color:

The Color Mixer panel lets you mix new colors, as well as change the stroke and fill colors of an object. You can also specify the fill attributes here.
The Color Swatches panel allows you to track colors used in a Flash document.
The Eyedropper tool lets you sample color from anywhere within your Flash authoring environment, the Color Mixer, or from color swatches.
The Properties panel lets you adjust the fill and stroke attributes.

NOTE

Another place you can adjust an object's fill and stroke color is the Colors section of the toolbar.

In addition to changing the color attributes of an object, you can change the color of symbols and symbol instances. Let's say you have a green circle graphic symbol that appears in a document. It's used quite a bit, and you need to change its color attribute to red throughout the entire presentation. The quickest way to do this is to open the circle in symbol editing mode. Once in symbol editing mode, the fill attribute can be swiftly changed to red. Since you made this change within the graphic symbol, the circle is now red everywhere it appears within your Flash document.

NOTE

There are three ways to get to symbol editing mode:

You can create a new symbol, which automatically brings you to symbol editing mode.
You can double-click on that particular symbol on the stage.
You can double-click the symbol within the Library.

The beauty of symbols is that Flash renders a symbol only once. It can be used over and over again without adding additional file size to your final movie. Utilizing the same example, whether you have one circle graphic symbol or 200 graphic symbols on the stage, your final movie will be the same size because Flash only needs to render that graphic symbol once.

Using the same example, let's say you need to change only an instance of the green circle graphic symbol. Using the Properties panel, you can change its color attributes by altering its tint, brightness, alpha, or all three through the Advanced option. Using the Color drop-down menu within the Properties Inspector can change all of these options.

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