The Creative Toolbox: Keeping up Appearances in Illustrator 9

George Penston

When Adobe unleashed Illustrator 9 on the masses of designers and production artists of the world, it not only answered the ongoing wish for active transparency in the versatile vector program but also added the capability of live effects. Because these features didn’t fit into Adobe‘s established UI, its developers built a new mechanism for handling the new functionality: the Appearance palette.

Deceptively powerful, the Appearance palette enables designers to manipulate live effects and other attributes and to build styles based on them. This palette can help reduce production debacles by allowing styles to be easily applied across documents. Its features also heighten creative flexibility.

The problem of course is that most of us are loathe to drift from the tried and true. With this column, we’ll explore the concepts behind the Appearance palette and look at some specific steps you can take to enhance your workflow with this new tool.

What Appearance Palette?
The most frequent response we’ve received when talking about the Illustrator 9 Appearance palette is “What are you talking about?” Easy to misjudge, the Appearance palette might first seem a glorified Info palette, simply reporting the appearance settings for a selected object. Looking deeper, however, you’ll see that the Appearance palette not only gives details of an object’s appearance settings such as stroke, fill, transparency, and effects, but also provides you with a direct interface into selecting and adjusting any one of these settings and — get this — adding more effects to them.

This means that just about any object can now include multiple fills, strokes, and live effects. To top it off, any of these fills, strokes, or effects can include discrete transparency settings, or a global setting can be applied to the entire object or layer. The Appearance palette manages them all.

Half Full or Filled Twice?
The ability to have multiple fills and strokes assigned to an object might be best understood by thinking about how colored gels work in theater lighting. Just as the color of the stage can be modified by adding multiple layers of colored gels over the light source, an object in Illustrator can now have multiple layers of fills, strokes, and effects. It’s helpful to think of Appearance attributes in this way because you can directly adjust their layering order within the Appearance palette for a desired effect.

To see this in action, try the following:

1. Draw a circle and bring up the Appearance palette: Window > Show Appearance.
2. With the circle still selected, click the Fill option in the Appearance palette to highlight it and then choose a yellow color within the Color palette.
3. Now with the Fill attribute (and the circle) still selected, click the page icon located at bottom of the Appearance palette to duplicate the selected items. You should now be presented with another Fill attribute with the yellow swatch.
   
   Clicking the page icon duplicates whatever attribute you have selected.
4. Pick a blue color for the currently selected Fill attribute, which should be the top Fill. The circle should now turn the same, blue color, because both fills are currently solid with 100% opacity setting.)
5. In the Transparency palette (Windows > Show Transparency) set the blue fill to 40-percent opacity. You should now be staring at a green circle. This is of course because yellow and the blue above combine to make green.
   
   Appearance attributes can be moved in stacking order just as you would a layer.
6. Now for kicks select the yellow fill and drag it as you would a layer above the blue fill in the Appearance palette. The circle turns solid yellow again.
7. Change the opacity for the yellow fill to 80 percent and choose the Overlay blend mode from the pull-down list. This should result in a slightly different hue of green than the previous layering order. It also illustrates the capability to apply varied transparency settings for just about any appearance attribute and to freely change the stacking order of them as well.
   
   Just about any appearance attribute can have its own transparency setting.

Illustrator 9’s capability to have multiple fills along with separate transparency settings makes layering effects possible on an object level basis, allowing greater creative control and flexibility in your illustrations.

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