Calamity! Client sends you their ASE colour file. You import it successfully. Three months later, you can't find those exact brand colours anywhere, and the client is asking for consistency across projects.

The problem isn't importing colours ... it's choosing where they live.

Affinity Publisher offers three distinct storage locations, each designed for different collaboration scenarios:

Document Palettes embed colours directly into your file. Perfect for client work where the brand colours must travel with the project. When you share the file or collaborate with other designers, everyone automatically has access to the exact same palette. No missing colours, no "close enough" substitutions.

App Palettes store colours across all Affinity applications on your machine but nowhere else. Ideal for your personal brand colours or frequently used palettes that you want available in Publisher, Designer, and Photo simultaneously. Import once, access everywhere in your Affinity workflow.

System Palettes (macOS only) make colours available to every application on your computer. Use this for colours you need in Keynote presentations, email signatures, or any non-Affinity software. Your brand purple appears identically whether you're in Publisher or Pages.

Think about who needs access to these colours and when

Most designers default to App Palettes without considering the collaboration implications. But when your client opens the file on their machine, those colours don't exist. Document Palettes solve this problem by making the colours part of the file itself.

For ongoing client relationships, I use Document Palettes for project-specific colours and App Palettes for my brand colours that appear across multiple client projects.

The workflow becomes: Document Palettes for colours that belong to the project, App Palettes for colours that belong to you, System Palettes for colours that need to work everywhere.

Choose based on who needs the colours, not just where you want to store them

When you import that next ASE file, pause and consider where those colours need to be accessible. Your future self, and your collaborators, will thank you for thinking beyond the immediate task.