Ever since Illustrator added the ability to add transparency in 2001, designers have been creating great looking designs by overlapping various colored frames then applying blending modes and changing opacity.

The problem comes in when you finally create the look you want, but want to use the colors from the overlapping transparent areas as Swatches.

Well, there isn’t a way to measure it. The Eyedropper tool doesn’t work. The Info Panel doesn’t help.

Maybe you’ve tried some workaround like taking a screen snap to measure the values in Photoshop. Or maybe you copied the art and pasted it in Photoshop to get the numbers.

No more. Using this really simple trick, you can add the colors from this art into your Swatches Panel in seconds. Yes…SECONDS.

Oh, and there’s a Bonus Scene where I show you how to do it in InDesign.