Pantone gradients in Illustrator

September 28, 2005 7:42 AM

How do I apply two Pantone spot colors to a linear gradient in Adobe Illustrator CS2?

Maybe I'm just dense, but I am having an unreasonable amount of trouble with this. I want the gradient to start with one Pantone color and end with another. Seems simple enough, right?

Whenever I try to choose a Pantone color swatch as one of my two gradient colors, the gradient goes away and is replaced by the solid Pantone color in the object I want to fill with the gradient. What am I doing wrong?

posted by killdevil to media & arts (5 comments total)

Try dragging the Pantone chip directly from the library or swatch palette to the little arrow slider underneath the gradient.
posted by fandango_matt at 7:47 AM on September 28, 2005

by "to" i meant, "onto".
posted by fandango_matt at 7:49 AM on September 28, 2005

Wow, that's less intuitive than it ought to be.

Thanks, fandango_matt!
posted by killdevil at 7:53 AM on September 28, 2005

No problem!

Look Ma, my first "Marked As Best Answer"!
posted by fandango_matt at 12:04 PM on September 28, 2005

this annoyed the hell out of me for a long time. I would screw it up once, and then remember the trick and have to do it right. The fact that the intuitive way doesn't work (dragging swatches) is insane to me, because the swatch is behaving like a style instead of a "paint chip."

The good thing, i guess, is that you can save a gradient swatch for future reuse. But then why is that not a STYLE?

anyway, just had to bitch in support of your confusion
posted by misterbrandt at 1:04 PM on September 28, 2005