Using color palettes for different color themes: Is it possible?

[NM_]

Would it be possible to swap the global colors of a document by swapping out the color palette (either a Document or Application Palette) when the following conditions are met?

• All colors used would be global colors, and defined in a single Document/Application Palette.
• The replacement palette would define different color values, but all with the same names as in the Palette being replaced.

Individually changing dozens of colors when all is needed is to change the color theme rather than the design is tedious.

Is there an efficient way to accomplish this?

Could this be potentially accomplished by hacking the actual .afdesign file using a hex editor?

Thanks in advance.

[walt.farrell]

1 minute ago, NM_ said:

Document/Application Palette

Just a note: Global colors require a Document Palette.

[walt.farrell]

9 minutes ago, NM_ said:

The replacement palette would define different color values, but all with the same names as in the Palette being replaced.

From a quick experiment, no, that won't work.

9 minutes ago, NM_ said:

Could this be potentially accomplished by hacking the actual .afdesign file using a hex editor?

Potentially, if you figured out enough about the undocumented format of .afdesign files.

[thomaso]

2 hours ago, NM_ said:

• The replacement palette would define different color values, but all with the same names as in the Palette being replaced.

Individually changing dozens of colors when all is needed is to change the color theme rather than the design is tedious.

How would you create the 'replacement palette' … without defining or "individually changing dozens of colors"?

If it doesn't need to remain vector / depending on your needs and layout objects, maybe an HSL adjustment can create a different colour theme instead. Or how about a LUT (requires APhoto)?

[NM_]

3 hours ago, thomaso said:

How would you create the 'replacement palette' … without defining or "individually changing dozens of colors"?

If it doesn't need to remain vector / depending on your needs and layout objects, maybe an HSL adjustment can create a different colour theme instead. Or how about a LUT (requires APhoto)?

Thanks. The new Palette's creation and naming would indeed be tedious. However, the palette would be exported and imported into several other files for re-theming. This is necessary for accommodating Section 508 compliance for color-blind people.

The current workflow is very inefficient. If you export a palette and import it back, the names are changed. If you remove an existing global color to replace with a new one with the same name, then all references to it are deleted.

[thomaso]

3 hours ago, NM_ said:

The current workflow is very inefficient. If you export a palette and import it back, the names are changed.

The Affinity colour handling is someway generally limited in various aspects, at least for spoiled users of other apps. It starts with the palette types (application versus document) and non-global vs global swatches. One most disturbing behaviour with global / spot colours are the (missing) swatches that do not get transferred with copy/paste within Affinity from one to another opened Affinity document. Even Assets, that seemed to be meant by concept as a kind of library to make objects application-wide available between documents do not transfer the swatch of a global colour applied to an asset.

[walt.farrell]

13 hours ago, NM_ said:

The current workflow is very inefficient. If you export a palette and import it back, the names are changed.

The global color names will remain the same if you delete the current palette, before reimporting it. And that makes sense, as you can't have two palettes with colors named Global Color 1, or Global Color 2.

But it still won't help you. The function doesn't work as you wish it would, and the existing colors won't change to match the newly imported values even when the names are the same.

[thomaso]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

But it still won't help you. The function doesn't work as you wish it would, and the existing colors won't change to match the newly imported values even when the names are the same.

The swatch names appear not to matter to get a global colour assigned to an object linked / matched with a certain swatch of a newly imported palette.

I can export a document palette –> change an assigned swatch name (without having an according layout object selected) and still get this swatch highlighted if I select the object after renaming the swatch.

If I then delete the palette and –> re-import the previously exported version (with the former swatch name) the object still is linked to this same swatch.

[thomaso]

15 hours ago, NM_ said:

However, the palette would be exported and imported into several other files for re-theming. This is necessary for accommodating Section 508 compliance for color-blind people.

Can you show an example of the visual difference between same swatches with new/modified colour definitions?

If the goal is not to create taste/"mood" variations of colour themes (visually like 'summer'/'winter' or 'happy'/'sad') but rather to compensate specific differences in colour human perception I still wonder if it would work with HSL or Recolour adjustments, LUT, or ideally with specific .icc colour profiles to match certain colours (spot or range) to a specific appearance (possibly with other colours leaving unchanged).