UI Screenshots

View the screenshots below to see what the settings for this function look like within the Randomill panel.

Randomize blend mode from a list of included/excluded blend modes. Compatible with all Adobe Illustrator objects.

Blend mode randomization can help you create complex layered transparencies in your backgrounds, textures, and other designs. Using this function is simple. Just select which blend modes you’d like to randomly apply to your selection, and just click the run button. Each blend mode has an equal chance of being applied to any given object in a selection. Grouped objects are treated as single objects, and all objects within a group will have the same blend mode applied to them.

Use in tandem with other Randomill functions for the best effect.

This random blend mode illustrator script is excellent when used in conjunction with some of Randomill’s other features, especially the random opacity function.  Each selected blend mode has an equal chance of being chosen for each object in your selection. One way to give a ‘weighted’ preference to certain blend modes is by using Randomill’s random selection function to then apply preferred blend modes.

For example, if you’d like one blend mode to appear more often than the others, randomize the blend modes, then select some percentage of objects using the random select function, and apply your preferred blend mode. This is just one of the many ways that Randomill’s various functions can be used in tandem with one another.

Usage in Adobe Illustrator & Sample Art

Randomizing blend mode in Adobe Illustrator is an excellent way to get some really complicated transparency effects. The way colors and gradients interact with each other through blend modes can really make a design stand out. For example, look at the before and after images below. The stained glass effect would be much less interesting and vibrant if the blend mode had just been set to ‘Normal’.

A single light blue square is placed at the top left of a blank white image.

Diamonds (Before)

Functions: Duplication (Grid) + Fill Color (Random HSL) + Stroke Color (Random HSL) + Scale (Random) + Rotation (Shift) + Position (Random) + Opacity (Random) + Blend Mode (Random) + Layer Order (Random)

A stained-glass like diamond pattern of blues, reds, and yellows create a fascinating transparency effect that covers the whole image.

Diamonds (After)

Duplicating the squares into a grid, and then iterating over that grid can create this stained glass design. Each copied square had a fill color and stroke color randomly applied from a list of 5 gradient colors. Stroke width, opacity, and blend more, and scale were also randomized. Rotation was randomized so that each square would end up being at a diagonal orientation, but gradient fills would be randomly rotated to avoid uniformity. Layer order was also randomized since grids are created in an ordered layer pattern.

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