Illustrator Tutorial: Power of Appearance

If you are like me, you probably over-looked one of Adobe Illustrator’s most powerful features, the appearance palette (this is actually window but I like to refer to them as palettes). In this palette lies a great wealth of control and manipulation of vector objects within Illustrator and is even useful in creating a reusable graphic styles using these controls and manipulations.

I started using Illustrator during version 6 of it’s development. During this time period, I was more familiar with Macromedia’s equivalent program, Freehand. It didn’t take long to adjust to Illustrator with the major difference’s for me lying in path editing operations. Even though I could use this version of Illustrator with ease... it didn’t spark that much interest for me and was just a more suitable program for working with logos since it wasn't resolution dependent. I still relied on using Photoshop for most of my creative ad layouts and designs.

Well, back in mid 2004, we were upgraded to OSX and brand new spankin’ Apple G5 computers at my place of work. Along with that came the new CS line of Adobe software (just Illustrator, Photoshop and Imageready for us). I was amazed at all the features in the new CS version of Illustrator and as usual where I work... we had no book or manual for the program and were forced to learn on our own by experimenting or using the online help. So, many features of AI were undiscovered for me during 2004 as we struggled with other software issues and such.

At the end of 2005, I started researching Illustrator on the internet more and played around more with some of its features. It was then I came across a tutorial on the appearance palete. I couldn’t believe I had overlooked this gem of feature so many times. It was right there in front of me and I never knew it. So let’s see what I found out.

Make sure to bring your APPEARANCE palette forward as we will be using this a lot here. You might even want to expand the length of the palette to about twice its size to make viewing all the layers easier. Notice I said “layers”. The fills and strokes in the APPEARANCE palette act just like layers in a sense. But, compared to layers... the fills and stroke views can’t be turned on or off without trashing the complete stroke or fill or dropping opacity down and they cannot be labeled like layers for easy reference. So keep this in mind as you work.

I am going to borrow a lesson from Ergodraw.com on creating a 3D ball effect for this tutorial. I wanted to use their lesson as an example of just what can be done with appearance palette versus using layers. My method has a couple of drawbacks and a couple of advantages compared to the layers method shown at Ergodraw and I will point those differences at later in the lesson. In the original lesson, the user was instructed to create 4 layers each containing the same duplicated circle filled with orange hue of your choice. We will be doing the same, except we are going to create multiple fills rather than layers in the APPEARANCE palette and we are going to create them one at a time since we cannot label or hide view easily.

So, starting out... we should draw one circle and size it roughly to 140 points in diameter. Make sure it is filled with an orange hue (just for this exercise... you can change it to another color for different results if desired). Let’s leave the stroke for this circle blank. Now if you select this circle, you should see we have one fill with the orange color and a stoke with nothing (Example A).