How to structure logos with different color combinations in Illustrator?

I'm sure this is a common problem, but I haven't found an efficient solution yet.

I've created a 4 color logo and I want to create a few versions of it with different colors for use on different backgrounds. I'd love to be able to use the same symbol as much as possible.

My natural inclination is to duplicate the symbol over a number of artboards in the same file, and have a different color scheme in each artboard, but it seems like I need to break the symbol to accomplish this.

My assumption is that there's no quick solution to this, but is there a common workflow that keeps things more-or-less linked and organized?

Answer

This probably isn't an ideal workflow in all cases but it shouldn't take too long to set up once you know what you're doing and does leave you with a single(-ish) unbroken symbol and will save you a lot of time and effort if you're spending any amount of time exploring different colorways whilst still working on the logo.

1. Create a symbol for each color and give the shapes within each of those symbols a color you will not be using (you can actually set them all to the same color — I only used different colors here so that you can see the different layers), greyscale is ideal here if possible (more on that later).

2. Color each symbol by adding a fill using the appearance panel.

3. 
   

   Group your symbols. You can now duplicate your group and change colors by simply selecting a group and using the Recolor Artwork tool.

   
   

   The reason we set our underlying shapes to greys is that the Recolor Artwork tool will give you both the colors set in the appearance panel and the colors within the symbol... But there is a "Preserve Grays" option which will stop those underlying symbol colors from cluttering our list of colors (they'll appear locked at the bottom).