20 Adobe Illustrator Appearance Panel Tips in 20 mins - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Graphic Design for Lunch 20 in 20 Appearance panel tips Intro: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, 20 Adobe Illustrator appearance panel tips in 20 minutes. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes, everyone of which teaches a small range of tips and techniques. Now today we're looking at the appearance panel in Illustrator. You'll see how to use it to format shapes and also to format text, which operates a little bit differently to shapes. You'll learn techniques for layering fills and strokes and for creating custom re-usable effect with the appearance panel. Mastering the appearance panel is a key skill for any Illustrator user. By the end of this course, you should have added a range of techniques and knowledge to your Illustrator skill set. As you're watching these video, you will see a prompt which asks if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you are enjoying the class, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes that you would recommend this class and secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying it. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too may enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I'll read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I'll look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started with our 20 appearance panel tips in 20 minutes or less. 2. Pt 1 - 5 Appearance panel tips: How to display the appearance panel. When you're working in Illustrator, there are a few ways that you can display the appearance panel. You can do it either here by clicking on the icon, which is a filled circle with a lot of little dots around it. You can choose Window and then Appearance, and that will display the dialogue. There's also a keyboard shortcut, Shift and function key F6. Before you can use the Appearance panel, you will need to select an object that is a little bit disconcerting because while the object is not selected, you still see that little thumbnail, but you will also see No Selection telling you that you don't have anything selected. Now, that I've selected this shape, you'll see that I have Path, which is telling me that anything I do in the Appearance panel will now affect the selected shape. Set the fill and stroke via the appearance panel. I'll select this shape and press Shift F6 to display the appearance panel. Here I can adjust the stroke and fill on the shape. If I click here on the stroke color, the entire stroke panel becomes accessible to me. I can choose another color for my stroke, I can adjust the stroke weight, then I can adjust other things to do with the stroke by just clicking here to open up the stroke panel. For the fill, I can do the same thing. Click here on the color swatch and I can choose a different color for my fill. Working with multiple fills and strokes. How to add a new fill or a new stroke. I'll select over my shape and I can add a second fill or a second stroke to this shape. I can do this in one of a number of ways. I could click here on these icons, Add New Stroke and Add New Fill. Let's add a second stroke that way. I'll remove that and let's have a look at another method from the flyout menu. Here you can choose Add New Fill or Add New Stroke. This time, I'll add a new fill. There is the second fill, it's been placed on top of the existing stroke and fill. You can also add a new fill or stroke by selecting either the stroke or the fill and click the new icon that will duplicate that selected item. That's pretty much the same as selecting it and dropping it onto the new icon. Layering strokes for multi-stroke effects. I'm going to select over this shape here. In the previous tip, we added a second stroke to it. Let's change the color of this topmost stroke. This stroke is on top of the green one because it's higher up in the appearance panel. If we were to reduce the width of the stroke, then we'll be able to see the green stroke underneath. Now, the pink stroke is five pixels wide, the green stroke is 18 pixels wide. Both of these strokes are positioned inside the shape. If you want to change the positioning, you're going to change the finished effect. I'm going to set this stroke to the center of the shape, and I'll do the same thing for the green stroke. This time you can see that because the strokes are centered, the pink one is over the top of the green one. Varying the position of the stroke as well as the layering will give you different effects. Quick edges using a reverse stroke and fill effect. Let's have a look at how I've assembled this shape. It has a green fill, and the stroke is a 30 pixel dashed line. It's created using a rounded cap. The weight of the line, 30 pixels is exactly the same weight as the gap here, and the dash is 0, and of course, we've got dashed line selected. All of those go together to create a dotted stroke for our shape. But the dots are on top of the fill, which is why we're seeing a complete dot here. What I want is a more of a scalloped edge effect. To achieve that, what I need to do is put the stroke underneath the fill because the effects in the appearance panel are stacked, the pink stroke is on top. If I move it underneath the fill, I get a very different look to my object, the one I wanted to create. 3. Pt 2 - 5 Appearance panel tips: Offset a fill or a stroke. This shape has a dashed line around and that's being created with a dashed stroke, has just a regular buck cap, it's a dashed line. The white of the line is six pixels, the dash is 20, and the gap is five. At the moment this stroke is sitting around the edge of the shape, but it doesn't have to be that way. I'll select the stroke and choose "Effect", "Path", "Offset Path". If I click "Preview", you'll see that the default setting is 10 pixels offset, which pushes the strike outside the shape. It's also possible to bring it inside the shape by using a negative offset. I'll click "Ok". In a similar way, you can offset a fill from a stroke. I have another shape here. In this case, if we have a look at this in the appearance panel, you'll see that the offset has been applied to the fill in this case, rather than the stroke. Create automatic reflections. For this star shape, it has a fill but no stroke. In the appearance panel, I want to create a reflection for it. I'm going to target the fill and add a second fill. I'm going to target the bottom-most one and I want to reflect this fill. With it selected, I'll choose "Effect", "Distort and Transform", and then "Transform". The settings I will use is to turn preview on and select the bottom middle of these nine boxes, and so that's going to be the reflection point. I'll click "Reflect Y" and click "Ok". This star is the same intensity as the top one. It would look a lot better if it had a simple gradient fill applied to it. I'll click on this fill and use a gradient swatch so I've pre-prepared. I just need to marginally adjust the gradient. I'm going to rotate it minus 90, so it goes in the opposite direction, I'll make the end of the gradient fully transparent by setting the opacity to 0, and I'm just going to adjust the transition point for the gradient so that it pitches out a little bit earlier. There's our automatically generated reflection for a star. Fill, stroke, and shape opacity settings. It's important to note that in the appearance panel that each of the strokes that you create and the fill each have their own opacity setting. I'm going to target this blue stroke, and I'm going to adjust its opacity so that we can see through it, and when we do, we're seeing through it to the stroke and the shape underneath. The fills also have their own opacity setting. You'll need to open up the fill using the triangle, click the "Opacity" and then adjust the opacity to suit. That makes the shape partially see-through. Now let's wind all the opacities back up to 100 percent because there is one other opacity setting, and that's this one down here, and it controls the opacity of the entire shape, the strokes as well as the fill. Let's wind it down and you'll see that we can see through everything in this shape now. When you're looking to create complex effects, be aware that every item in the appearance panel will have its own opacity setting as well as the entire shape having its own setting. Blending fills and strokes and shapes. I have a single circle here that has two additional fills; a blue an orange, and a pink. These fills have been transformed, so they've been moved using the Transform Effect dialogue. I want to blend these together so I'm going to the topmost one, and through the transparency panel here, I can change the blend mode to multiply. This fill is going to interact now with the fills below. I'm going to do the same thing to this fill here, go to the transparency panel and change its blend mode to multiply. We're getting a different look to our shape. Now you can also blend the entire shaping with objects underneath. You do that through this transparency panel, the one that belongs to the entire shape. We're going to set that to multiply blend mode. Now there's nothing underneath the shape right now to see with, but I do have a rectangle placed here. I'm just going to turn that on, and you can now see that the entire shape is interacting with the colored square below. Limiting blends to a shape. I have two identical shapes here, and within the shapes, the top two fills have got multiply blends on them. The colors are blending within the shape, but let's have a look and see what happens when I put a colored fill behind one of these shapes. You can see that the colors are now different because this shape is interacting with the solid background behind it. If you don't want that to be the case, what you can do is you can tell Illustrator to limit any of these blends to only operate within the shape, and not to operate as between the shape, and anything behind it. To do that, you will target the shape, and here in the Appearance panel, you'll open up the transparency, and click here on "Isolate Blending". Now the colors in this shape are exactly the same as they would be if the shape didn't have anything behind it. 4. Pt 3 - 5 Appearance panel tips: Add a second shape to a shape. It's possible to create shapes within a shape using the appearance panel. I'm going to add another fill to this shape here, and I'm going to re-color it. Now I'm going to make this a circle which I can do by selecting these fill and choose effect and then convert to shape. I'm going to convert this to an ellipse. I'm going to make sure that preview is turned on and I'm going to set an absolute size. I'm going to make my ellipse a circle, so I'm going to set it to a 100 by 100 pixels. Now we have a circle in the middle of our shape and it's all done inside the appearance panel. Make a hole in a shape. In the last tip we created this circle inside this shape. Since then I've added a colored shape behind this shape so that in a minute when we poke a hole through this shape using this circle, we should be able to see this blue filled shape behind it. So with this shape selected, I'm going to the fill that controls the circle. I'm going to click on the opacity setting to open up the transparency panel, and we'll set these shapes opacity to zero. That's really important because any fill that has its opacity set to zero can be used as a knockout for the shape. You do that from the opacity setting for the entire shape, and you'll click here on knockout group until you get a check mark in it. Now you can see that we've created a hole inside this shape. Create snappy borders using a gradient and a reverse gradient effect. I have a shape here that is filled with a simple linear gradient. We can create an interesting border from this shape by adding a stroke, and we're going to add the same gradient as a stroke. I'm going to increase the weight of the stroke. Then let's go to the gradient panel and let's reverse this gradient. So instead of zero percent, we're going to set it to minus 180. The impact of using a gradient in one direction for the fill and the gradient in another direction for the stroke gives you an interesting border effect. Understand and reverse engineer graphic styles. When you have a shape in Illustrator and you apply a graphic style to it, if you're interested in understanding what went to make that graphic style, open the appearance panel with that shape selected. You'll be able to see all the fills and strokes that have been applied to this shape to create this particular style. You'll be able to experiment with turning things on and off, and also adjust the settings perhaps to create your own graphic style. But it's certainly a handy way of learning more about how shapes can be formatted. Make holes in a stroke of dots. In an earlier tip, we saw how we could poke a hole in a shape using a knockout group. Now we can do the same sort with a stroke. Let's have a look at this shape. It's got two dots strokes on it. One of which is set up with a gap of 50 pixels and a weight of 50 pixels. The second one is set up with the exact same gap, but the width is much smaller. So we've got smaller circles inside the larger ones. To create this as a knockout will do as exactly as we did before. We'll go to the opacity of the one we want to use as the knockout or the one to make the holes and wind it back to zero. Then with the shape still selected, we're going to select knockout group, and that knocks holes in this stroke this time so that we can see through it to these shapes below. 5. Pt 4 - 5 Appearance panel tips: Text as a special case using character appearances. I have a piece of text typed in here which I've now selected. You'll see that the Appearance panel looks a little bit different when you're working with text to when you're working with shape. Because this is a type object, but the characters themselves are what have the color attached to them. I'm going to the Text tool, I'm going to select a single character, and change the color of that character. With the Type tool, I can select over any character in this text and simply change its color. But I need to do that through the Characters area. Shadow rainbow text using characters and text appearances. In the previous tip, we saw how we could select individual characters and color them through the Characters panel to create something like this multicolored text. It's not however possible for us to add a drop shadow to this text this way. Because if I choose "Effect" and then "Stylize," the Drop Shadow tool is not available. For this, we need to be in the Type No Appearance area. I'm going to select it. Now I can add a drop shadow to my type; Effect, Stylize, Drop Shadow. If you ever find that some effect is not available through the characters area of this dialog, click on "Type" and you may find that you're able to add it to an entire type object rather than individual characters. Creating gradient filled text. I have a piece of text typed here and it is live text. I want to fill it with a gradient, so I'm going to try to do that through the Characters panel. I'll open it and switch from a filled color to a gradient. While it looks like this has worked, when I click away from the text, it hasn't actually worked at all. The gradient hasn't been applied to the text. Instead, we need to select over the text and apply the gradient through the Type area. We'll add a new fill and we'll make sure that that fill is the gradient. Now you may see some black lines around the outside of the text, and that is because the characters area here of the Type has a fill in it and it's actually a black fill, even though it looks like a gradient, it's really confusing. What you want to do is to come in here and remove that fill. Come back to the Type area. Now we have our gradient filled text and we have no ugly black lines around it. Create a stencil text effect using transparency when outlines need to be used. We're going to create this stencil look now. Unfortunately, we can't do it with Live Type, so we'll have to convert our Type to Outlines first. Select the choose "Type," and then Create Outlines and then Object, Ungroup. We're going to add our Outer Glow. We'll select on the "Compound Path" so it's applied to the entire shape. Effect, Stylize, Outer Glow. I'm using a red color multiply blend mode, a 75 percent opacity, and a 30 pixel blur. Adjust these to suit your text. I'll click "Okay." Now to create our knockout, we'll set the fill opacity to zero. The fill can be any color. The opacity just has to be set to zero. Then we'll go to our Transparency panel settings again and double-click here on "Knockout." Save complex appearances using graphic styles. Whenever you have a complex appearance created for a shape, you can save it so you can reuse it later on as a graphic style. Open up the Graphic Styles panel and click "New Graphic Style." It'll now be added as a graphic style. If you empty out the Graphic Style panel except for this style, select the fly-out menu and choose "Save Graphic Style Library." You can save your graphic style library so that you can open it and use it again in any other document in future. You can then go ahead and create a shape and apply that graphic style to it in a single click. 6. Bonus tip: For our bonus tip, we're going to create this effect as an appearance. So I'm going to take the number 2 and work with it to achieve the same result. With it selected, I'm going to the characters area because I want to turn off this black stroke. I don't want the text to be black at all. I'm going to type and I'm going to make it white. So I'll add a new fill for my text. I'm going to make it white eventually, but for now, let's just make it a pinky color so we can actually see what we're doing. We're going to add another fill which we're going to make this pink circle with. I'll click here to add a new fill. It's behind the type 1 right now. I'm going to make it this rich pink color, and then I'm going to set this to be a circle. So with it selected, I'll choose "Effect" and then "Convert to Shape" and "Ellipse." I'll turn preview on. I'll turn absolute on as well, and I need to make this dot a lot larger. I'm thinking probably around 500 for the width and height will be perfect. That looks pretty good. It's just in the wrong place. So I'll click "Okay". Now I need to move it, and to move the circle, I'm going to use the transformed tool. Effect, Distort, and Transform, and then Transform. I'll turn preview on so I can see what I'm doing, and I just want to adjust the vertical setting for this. So I am setting it to minus 90, which works with this particular font and the font size that I'm working with. You'll need to adjust it to whatever it is going to work for your particular font. Now I want a dotted line around my shape, so, let's go and get a stroke. We're going to set the stroke to the color we want to use, and then we're going to make a dotted stroke, so, I'm going to set the stroke weight to 50, I'll click on Strokes and I'm going to do a round cap and a dashed line, 0 pixels for the dash and 50 pixels for the gap. Now what I want to do, is to do the exact thing to the stroke that I did to this fill, so, I'm going to open up this fill panel. I want to duplicate of this ellipse settings, so, I'm going to click it and then click duplicate selected item, and that's doubled up the ellipse, so, I'm going to move it up, so, it's with the stroke. I've got one ellipse on the stroke and one on the fill, and you can see that we're getting the stroke that we're looking for. Now, just a heads up here, if you use this option here, you get a totally different look. I'm not quite sure why it's working like that, but that's the way it does work. So you may need to adjust which one of these options you use to actually keep your dots when you do just what I just did then. Now, we also need to move this transform. We need to do the same transform for the stroke here as we did for the ellipse, so, let's click on the transform and duplicate it, and we're going to take one of these up and just drop it on the ellipse. At this point, we can just go ahead and recolor our texts because I'm going to set it to white. To finish up, we need to put the stroke behind the fill, and that's actually going to break this a little bit, so, let's see what's going to happen. Let's go to the stroke and let's drag it behind the fill. You can see that it's off slightly, so, what we need to do, is to just adjust our transform, so, I'll click on Transform, turn preview on, and I'm going to start reducing this value. I'm just going to eyeball the result that looks pretty good to me. So that's our effect for our numbers. Now, we can save that as a graphic style by going to the graphic style panel and clicking to add it. It can now be applied to any of these text objects. We'll select the number 3 and just click to format the number 3 exactly same way as we've formatted the number 2 here. Let's do that for number 4. Of course it would work for this particular font and font size, even for letters of the alphabet. 7. Project and wrapup: I hope that you've enjoyed this set of 20 appearance panel tips in 20 minutes or less. Your project for this class is to post an image of one or more of the tips that I've shown here that particularly speak to you. Now, as you're working through this class, you will have seen a prompt asking if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class and learn something from it, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes that you do recommend the class, and secondly, write even in just a few words why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions. I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.