This tips and tricks guide will cover the gradient tools, including the randomiser, and the gradient stop tools.
First things first; enabling them! Next to the gradient bar, you will see a button with three dots “…” This is used throughout Designer to indicate that there are more features tied to this that have been hidden for simplicity. Clicking this will enable the extra features.
This can be done on any preset that uses the gradient bar; from Perlin Noise, 2D Gradient or the Ripple effect to name just a few.
Once the “…” has been selected, you will see new options appear below the gradient bar:
The options, in order of left to right, are tools that will create a random gradient, distribute stops evenly, randomise stop positions, shuffle colours, a load feature to load a saved gradient bar, and an option to save the gradient bar. These will be covered more precisely below.
Selecting the reverse tool will automatically flip all the positions of the stops, creating the exact inverse effect. Anything at 50.00 will remain there, but everything on either side will automatically swap sides.
The randomise stop positions button will change the positions of all the stops to be completely randomised. This can be useful to examine different colour combinations.
Distributing all the stops evenly will cause all the stops to become perfectly spaced apart. This is useful to create an ordered, even transition between the colours chosen in the stops.
Selecting the shuffle colour button will reassign all currently added colours to new stops. It will not change the colours themselves, but will change the order in which they are placed.
The most interesting feature in this toolset is the create random gradient tool. Once the button is opened, it will automatically create a new, random gradient adhering to the settings stated below. Altering these settings will automatically update the gradient that has been created, so you can see the effects each has as you affect them. I will cover each of these settings below.
The initial colour is used as the basis that all other settings will affect. For this, you can either randomise it (by clicking the button to the side) or choose a colour based on your intended pallet.
Next, the Hue variance will determine how different the other stop colours can be from the initial colour. Keeping this low will create stops that are within a similar hue value, creating a more nuanced transition effect.
Saturation variance will determine how much the saturation will vary between each stop. Increasing this will allow for the colour to fade nicely into a paler or darker version of itself.
Brightness variance will then determine the intensity level variance that the stops can deviate by. This will allow for each stop to be brighter or dimmer that the base colour.
The Stop count will determine how many stops the gradient will use, and how many different variations of the base colour that can be present.
The Position variance will determine how randomly spaced each stop is away from each other. At a position variance of 0, each stop will be evenly spaced apart. Increasing this value will cause all stops to gradually migrate to a new random position.
Clicking Generate at the bottom will create a new random seed, changing all stops but based on the same settings. This is not necessary to create your first effect, so should only be clicked if you want to see a different gradient bar with the same settings.
