Tutorial: How to create colorful stripes in Illustrator

Probably you had seen these color stripes in many websites like Veerle’s blog and others, these stripes are beautiful elements for web design and even other applications like brochures and flyers. Maybe you think that have to create the color squares one by one and it could be a time consuming process, but here I will teach you the easy way.

First of all, you need to have Adobe Illustrator (recommended CS2 and above) installed on your computer. Launch it and open a new document. Then, head on to select the Rectangular Grid Tool, which is hiding under the Line Segment Tool group. Next, click on the blank canvas (not drag), a Rectangular Grid Tool Options windows appeared. Fill in the options shown in the picture below. Make sure the two options at the bottom of the Options are checked. Click “OK” and the skeleton Rectangular Grid is created.

Notice that the Grid is all joined up. So you need to free them up:

First: Ungroup them. The strokes are all separated.
Second: Open up the Pathfinder Palette, click “Divide”.
Third: Ungroup them once more.

Now, they are all become an individual rectangular. Next, by using the Direct Selection Tool aka the white arrow, drag to select the points of the two rectangular that sits side by side. Now, by using arrow tool, feel free to move it left or right, so that you can have a stripes with different width value.

In final steps, you can start coloring your stripes! I suggest to use free online color schemes to assist you in color selection for example, Kuler, ColourLovers, or ColorSchemer Gallery. But in here, I use Japanese Traditional Colors. With the color scheme pasted onto the canvas, you now can use the eyedropper tool to color up those stripes.

Congratulations, your colorful stripes is now done! Pretty easy to do isn’t it? The best part is the customization is still available if you want to edit it, because it is in vector format.