Colors are displayed as circular petals arranged in a flower layout. The floating toolbar at the bottom lets you add, remove, and shuffle petals. The top bar shows the palette name with undo/redo and browsing controls.
Click a petal to apply its color to selected layers as a linked fill. Shift-click applies a linked stroke instead. Change the petal's color later and every linked layer updates automatically.
Who This Is For
Designers and animators working in After Effects or Illustrator who want a faster way to build, manage, and apply color palettes. Petals is especially useful when you need to experiment with colors across many layers and want changes to propagate instantly.
Two Host Apps
Petals works in both After Effects and Illustrator. The core experience is the same, but the linking mechanism differs:
- After Effects uses a palette composition with expression-linked color properties. Linked layers read their color from this composition.
- Illustrator uses document swatch groups with spot colors. Linked objects reference the swatch, and updating the swatch updates all uses.
Most of these docs apply to both hosts. Where behavior differs, the distinction is noted.
How It Works
Petals combines three ideas:
- Generate palettes. Click the shuffle button or start from scratch. Petals draws from 1,000 curated palettes and nine algorithmic styles (vibrant, pastel, jewel, muted, neon, earth, cool, warm, contrast).
- Apply colors to layers. Click a petal to apply it as a linked fill on your selected layers. The link is an expression (After Effects) or swatch reference (Illustrator) that reads the color from a central source.
- Update everywhere at once. When you change a petal’s color, every layer linked to that petal updates immediately. No manual find-and-replace.
Key Concepts
Petals are the colored circles in the flower layout. Each petal holds one color. You can have up to 19 petals per palette.
Palettes are named collections of petals. Each project can have multiple palettes, and you can save favorites to a cross-project library.
Linking connects a layer’s fill or stroke to a specific petal. Linked properties update automatically when the petal’s color changes.
Profiles control the style of randomly generated palettes. You can filter the shuffle button to only produce certain styles like pastel or jewel tones.