Forums: Design:

How does one make a background color on illustrator or is it best not to and put that in photoshop later?

Maybe a colored box in illustrator but then remove it at the end and add a real background in photoshop?

Uh, there is a square tool, and you can drag it any size.

Am I totally missing what your talking about?

No thats what I meant by colored box. I was asking to see if there was a different way of doing it that just sets the background color.

An Illustrator document doesn't have a "background". In fact, it doesn't even have boundaries really, what you see is just what is going to print using the current settings. So the "background"(what you see on screen) is white but really it's transparent, there's no "background" there.

If you'd posted this in design instead of Front End you would have got your answers faster.


What RDS said is absolutely correct.

there is an option to change the display colour of the artboard though - If you just want to change your artboard colour, do this:

In the top menu go to "file", then click on "document setup". In the document setup window, select "transparency" then "simulate paper", click on the top grid colour swatch, and you can choose a new colour with the colour picker there. That will change your artboard colour for this document only, and won't affect printing.

The only disadvantage here is that it will add a transparent tone to all of the art, too, like if you were printing on coloured paper (surprise, susrprise)

good info ari... thanks