Adobe Illustrator CS2

You’ll notice that Adobe Illustrator CS2 has both a Filter menu and an Effect menu. At first glance, the contents of these menus seem very similar and many of the items listed in the Filter menu appear to be identical to those in the Effect menu. In truth, there’s a big difference between filters and effects in Illustrator CS2.

As we mentioned, effects in Illustrator CS2 are referred to as Live Effects, and as they are applied, they appear in the Appearance palette. As you update your objects, any applied effects update accordingly. You can remove or edit these nondestructive effects at any time. In contrast, once you apply a filter, the actual vector object is changed and the filter can’t be edited or removed. For this reason, you can refer to filters as “dead effects” because they are applied to objects in a destructive fashion.

Although you will most likely use effects for the majority of your work, there are certain times when it makes sense to use filters instead. For example, there may be times when you need to apply a filter and edit the vector paths right away. Rather than having to apply an effect and then expand it, you can just apply the filter, which is already expanded.

Additionally, some items in the Filter menu do not appear in the Effect menu—namely, those that appear in the Filter > Color and Filter > Create submenus. These filters (for example, converting color objects to grayscale or creating trim marks) are usually applied once and aren’t edited afterward.

Adobe Illustrator CS2 has two entire menus dedicated to manipulating art and applying cool effects (like 3D and warp distortions): the Filter menu and the Effect menu. The Effect menu differs from the Filter menu in several ways (see the sidebar “Featured Match-Up: Filters vs. Effects”), but one of the most important is how effects are used in concert with the Appearance palette.

Illustrator refers to effects as Live Effects. There are several reasons for this. First of all—and most importantly—any effect that you apply from the Effect menu is added as an attribute in the Appearance palette. Secondly, all effects can be edited at any time, even after the file has been closed and reopened at another date. Finally, when an object’s path is edited, any effects that are applied to that object are updated as well. Because these effects are non-destructive, they are considered as “live” and are always editable.

The way that Illustrator accomplishes this live behavior is by keeping the underlying vector object intact, while changing just the appearance of the object by adding the effect. Think of those 3D glasses that you get at a movie theater. Without the glasses, the movie appears like any other, but once you don the glasses, the movie appears to be 3D. You can think of the Appearance palette as a pair of 3D glasses in this sense—once you add an effect, the object changes in appearance, but the original untouched vector paths remain beneath the hood.

You can choose from many different Live Effects in Illustrator, including those that are vector-based (like Scribble) as well as those that are raster-based (like Gaussian Blur). For the purposes of understanding how these effects work and how they interact with the Appearance palette, we’ll discuss what is arguably the most commonly used live effect—Drop Shadow—in this chapter. The remainder of the Live Effects are covered in Chapter 7, 3D and Other Live Effects.

You’ll notice that you can’t select a specific attribute of an object from the artboard—the only place to access this functionality is via the Appearance palette. This makes the Appearance palette infinitely important, but it may make you wonder how an object with a complex appearance will print. After all, how does the printer or export format know to draw these multiple attributes on a single path?

The answer is that Illustrator breaks these complex appearances down into multiple overlapping paths—each path contains a basic appearance. This process, called expanding, doesn’t happen on your artboard—it happens in the print stream or the export stream.

There are times when you may want to manually expand your appearances to access the multiple attributes on the artboard. To do so, choose Object > Expand Appearance. Remember that once you’ve expanded an appearance, you are dealing with a group of multiple objects, not a single object anymore. Each of those individual objects has a basic appearance, and unless you’ve created a graphic style (covered later in this chapter), you have no way to return to the original complex appearance.

Objects that have a Fill and a Stroke attribute are referred to as having a basic appearance. However, vector objects aren’t limited to just one fill and one stroke and can contain multiple attributes. An object with more than just one fill or stroke is referred to as having a complex appearance.

To add an attribute to an object, choose Add New Fill or Add New Stroke from the Appearance palette menu. You’ll see the new attribute appear in the Appearance palette, where you can change its place in the stacking order. Alternatively, you can drag a Fill or a Stroke attribute to the duplicate icon at the bottom of the Appearance palette. Dragging an attribute to the trash icon removes the attribute from the object.

Choosing to add a new stroke from the Appearance palette menu. There’s no limit to how many fills or strokes you can add to a single object.

You may be wondering what good two fills or two strokes do in an object, because one always covers the one beneath it. Earlier, we discussed the ability to target a specific attribute so that you can apply settings to each individually. By first targeting the lower fill and specifying one color and then targeting the second fill, choosing a different color, and setting that fill to overprint, or by giving it an opacity setting or a blend mode, you’ve combined two inks in a single object. Adding multiple strokes, each with different widths, colors, and dash patterns, can result in useful borders or even stitch lines. There are numerous reasons for adding multiple attributes, and there’s no limit to how many fills or strokes you can add to an object. Another benefit of numerous fills and strokes is that you can create a complex appearance yet edit just a single path. We’ll discuss more ways in which this feature can be useful when we talk about Live Effects, later in this chapter.

The Appearance palette also gives you control over the behavior of appearances. At the bottom of the palette are several buttons:

• New Art Has Basic Appearance. This toggle, on by default, means that each new object you draw will have a basic appearance—a single fill and a single stroke. Normally, Illustrator styles a newly drawn object based on the last object that is selected. For example, if you click an object with a black stroke and a yellow fill, the next object you draw has a black stroke and a yellow fill as well. However, if you select an object with a complex appearance and then create a new shape, you may not want that new shape to be drawn with multiple attributes. When this is toggled off, all new objects pick up the complex appearances of any object previously selected.
• Clear appearance. This function reduces any appearance to a single fill and a single stroke, both with an attribute of None. This is a great way to select a shape and start from scratch.
• Reduce to Basic Appearance. This function reduces any complex appearance to a basic appearance by removing all fills and strokes except for the topmost fill and the topmost stroke.

The Appearance palette contains several functions to control the appearances of objects.

Draw a rectangle with the default white fill and a 10-point black stroke and take a look at the Appearance palette. When the rectangle is selected, the Appearance palette displays a thumbnail icon and the word “Path,” which is the targeted item. (When we discuss Groups later in the chapter, we’ll discuss what the target is.) The palette also lists the target’s stroke (with the weight beside it), the fill, and the transparency. The order in which the listed items appear is important, because they define the final appearance of the object.

Selecting vs. Targeting

At first glance, it can appear that selecting and targeting are one and the same. They appear this way because of Illustrator’s Smart Targeting feature, where Illustrator does most of the targeting for you automatically, but selecting and targeting are really two different things.

For the most part, selecting is an action that is used to define a set of criteria that will be used for performing transformations. As we’ll see in Chapter 4, Advanced Vectors, transformations consist of moving, scaling, rotating, skewing, or mirroring objects. You select objects because you want to move them from one side of your document to another, because you want to delete them, and so on.

Targeting on the other hand, is an action that is used to define a set of criteria specifically to apply an attribute such as a stroke, a fill, a transparency, or a live effect. When you select a path with the Selection tool, Illustrator automatically targets that path so that you can apply attributes to it. However, there may be times when you want to specifically target an entity. For example, you can target a layer and then add a stroke attribute to it. This gives every object on the layer a Stroke attribute (we’ll discuss this concept in detail later in this chapter). Selecting the layer simply selects all of the objects on that layer. Applying a Stroke attribute at this point results in the individual paths getting the stroke. Targeting the layer results in the layer itself getting the Stroke attribute (the layer is a container, much like a group is a container for its contents).

When you add a stroke to a layer, it is added to the top of the stacking order. All objects on that layer appear with a stroke. Because the stroke applies to the entire layer, even objects that are overlapping each other are stroked.

The Appearance palette displays the attributes for the targeted item.

Let’s expand on what you learned in the previous chapter about fills and strokes. By default, a fill is painted first; the stroke is then painted on top of the fill. This is why you can see the entire weight of a stroke that is painted on the centerline of a path. However, you can click the Stroke attribute that is listed in the Appearance palette and drag it so that it appears listed beneath the Fill attribute.

The Appearance palette gives you the ability to change the stacking order of attributes. Here, the stroke attribute appears beneath the path’s fill.

You can also use the Appearance palette to target individual attributes by simply clicking them to highlight them. For example, when you click an object to select it, you can apply an opacity setting to that object via the Transparency palette. This opacity setting is applied to both the Fill and the Stroke attribute of the selected object. However, if you first target the fill by clicking it in the Appearance palette and then changing the opacity setting, you’ll notice that the setting is applied to the fill only and not to the stroke. This is indicated in the Appearance palette by a disclosure triangle just to the left of the Fill entry: The Opacity setting appears indented immediately underneath the fill’s Color setting.

The importance of the Appearance palette is obvious. Without it, you have no way to edit multiple attributes applied to an object; you have no way to edit attributes that are applied to groups or layers; and you have no way to edit the properties of a live effect.

The importance of the Layers palette is equally apparent. Without it, you have no way to understand the hierarchy of a file and you have no warning as to when a simple action like grouping or ungrouping will change a file’s appearance.

But it’s deeper than that. The Appearance palette is like the Matrix—you can look at it and see the underlying makeup of any Illustrator file. By using the Layers and Appearance palettes together, you can quickly and efficiently reverse engineer any file that you receive. If you’re a production artist who needs to know every detail about a file, or if you’re trying to troubleshoot a particular file, these two palettes will be your best friends.

Don’t trust everything you see on the artboard. It’s easy to create a single object, group it by itself, and then apply a 50-percent opacity setting to the object, the group, and the layer. The result is an object that prints at 12.5-percent opacity. The meatballs in the Layers palette should be an indicator that you need to take a closer look.

Throughout the remaining chapters of this book, you’ll learn how features like clipping and opacity masks, envelope distortions, and placed images are all easily identified in the Layers palette. You’ll also learn the importance of using layers when you’re creating Flash animations or SVG files for the Web.

If you take another look at the Layers palette, you’ll notice that to the right of every item listed is a small circle, called the target indicator. If you remember, we spoke earlier about how the target controls where attributes are applied. If you take the same examples we used earlier, the ones of identical design elements of which one is grouped and one is not, you can clearly see how targeting works.

In the Layers palette, the ungrouped design element appears listed as separate paths, whereas the grouped design element appears as objects nested inside a group. When you select the first design element, a double circle appears on each of the individual paths, indicating that those paths are targeted. Now select the grouped design element and you’ll see that although the objects are selected, the group is targeted.

A quick look at the Layers palette reveals the hierarchy of the file. Layer 1 contains two path objects and a group. The group contains two path objects.

Selecting the path objects also targets the two individual paths. The large squares to the right indicate the objects are selected and the small square to the right of the layer indicates that some objects on the layer are selected, but not all of them.

When selecting the group, Illustrator’s Smart Targeting feature targets the group, not the objects themselves. Notice the double circle target indicator appears only on the group, not the objects.

Now you’ll add a drop shadow to each of the design elements. A quick glance at the Layers palette now shows that some of the target indicators are shaded or filled, whereas some of the target indicators are hollow. Hollow circles indicate that the item listed has a basic appearance, whereas filled circles indicate that a complex appearance exists on that object (Adobe engineers refer to these filled circles as meatballs). Just by looking at the Layers palette, you can tell that the second design element has some kind of effect applied to the group. This is your first indication that ungrouping such a group will result in a change in appearance.

Shaded target indicators—meatballs—show where complex appearances exist.

You can manually target groups or layers by clicking the target indicator for that object. For example, you can target a layer and then use the Appearance palette to add a new stroke. The Appearance palette lists the attributes for the targeted layer, and if you look at the contents of the palette, you’ll see that the stroke appears above the contents of the layer. Dragging the stroke underneath the contents of the layer causes the stroke to be drawn behind each of the objects on that layer. When you drag a shape into such a layer the object automatically appears to have a stroked appearance, and when you drag any objects out of that layer, that stroked appearance disappears.

With a layer targeted, you can add appearances directly to the layer. Here, a stroke has been added to the layer, and the stroke has been moved to appear below the contents of the layer, adding an interesting outlining effect.

The important concept to remember is that taking a quick look at the Layers palette and scanning for meatballs helps you find complex appearances that appear in the file. In this way, you won’t accidentally change a file’s appearance just by grouping or ungrouping objects.

The Appearance palette is also useful in helping you understand how files are built because if you select an object that is part of a group or layer that has an appearance applied, the Appearance palette lists the group or layer above the target.

When you select an object that is part of a group or layer that has a complex appearance, the Appearance palette alerts you to this by displaying multiple targets.

If you find that the level of detail offered by the Layers palette is beyond the needs of your simple design tasks, you can set the behavior of the Layers palette to match the functionality that existed prior to Illustrator 9. Choose Palette Options from the Layers palette menu and check the Show Layers Only button. This hides all objects from the Layers palette. Additionally, you can turn off layer thumbnails (which will significantly enhance performance). For documents that have lots of layers (like maps, for example), you might also choose the Small option for Row Size. One caveat to these options is that they are document-specific, which means that you need to change these settings for each document.

Turning off layer thumbnail previews in the Palette Options dialog significantly enhances performance in large files.

Choosing the Small option for Row Size in the Palette Options dialog can give you the ability to see far more layers on screen at once and reduce the need to scroll as often.

You can create nested layers by dragging one layer into another layer. You can do the same with groups as well, which makes it easy to organize your artwork even after the art is created. In fact, this method of dragging items within the Layers palette makes it possible to move objects from one group and place them into another group. As you learned earlier in this chapter, groups can have attributes applied to them; this becomes significant because when you’re moving an object into a group that has an attribute applied to it, that object takes on the attributes of the group. The reverse applies as well, so simply moving an object from one layer to another, or into or out of a group can change the appearance of the art in your file.

When you’re dragging layers in the Layers palette, black arrows on the left and right indicate that you’re moving a layer into another layer rather than above or below it.

When a layer contains artwork, a disclosure triangle appears just to the left of the layer. Clicking this triangle reveals the contents of the layer within the Layers palette. Every object that appears in an Illustrator document appears listed in the Layers palette. The order in which items appear has significance—it indicates the stacking order, or object hierarchy of the file. Objects that appear at the bottom of the Layers palette are drawn first, and therefore they appear at the bottom of the object stacking order.

Clicking a disclosure triangle reveals the raw power of the Layers palette—the ability to view the entire object hierarchy of a file.

You can drag items listed in the Layers palette to adjust where they sit in the stacking order. Dragging an object from the bottom of the Layers palette to the top of the palette places that object at the top of the stacking order. It’s important to note that each layer and each group also maintain their own stacking order. The Layers palette basically represents the stacking order of the entire file.

Layers are nearly identical to groups in concept, but they offer more flexibility and functionality. Whereas groups are used to combine design elements in a file, layers also allow you to organize and combine elements within a file. Just as groups can be nested within each other, so can layers. And just as groups are containers that hold contents within them, layers are containers as well. In addition, layers, just like groups, can also have attributes applied to them. As we explore the power of layers in Illustrator, all of these concepts will come to light.

The Layers Palette

You’ll start learning to use layers by taking a look at the Layers palette and learning some of its simple functions. Then you’ll put together everything that you’ve learned in this chapter to take full advantage of the power found in the Layers palette.

By default, all Illustrator documents are created with a single existing layer, called Layer 1. The buttons across the bottom of the palette are used to activate clipping masks (which we’ll cover in detail in Chapter 5, Brushes, Symbols, and Masks), create new layers and new sublayers, and to delete layers. To the left of each layer are two boxes—the box on the far left controls layer visibility, whereas the other box enables locking.

Double-clicking a layer enables you to specify several settings for that layer:

• Name. Every layer can have its own distinct name. Layer names are important when you’re creating SVG files and generally make files easier to work with. Naming layers is especially important when you’re designing templates. A file littered with layers named Layer 1, Layer 2, Layer 3, can make editing a challenging task.

  Note

  Option-click (Alt-click) the visibility icon of a Layer to hide all other layers with one click. Option-click (Alt-click) once more to show all layers again. The same shortcut applies to the lock icon as well. To change layer visibility for multiple layers, you can click and drag across several layers.

• Color. This setting is a bit deceiving because it doesn’t add a fill color to the layer but instead defines the selection color used for the layer. When you select an object in Illustrator, the path of that object is highlighted so that you see what is selected. By assigning different colors to each layer, you can tell what objects belong to which layer by selecting the object and observing the highlight color. Setting a layer color to black or really light colors generally isn’t a good idea because you won’t be able to differentiate a selection from a regular path.
• Template. This setting is used specifically when you want to manually trace placed images. Setting a layer as a Template automatically locks the layer and sets the Dim Images setting to 50 percent. Although this makes it easier to see and draw over placed images, the new Live Trace feature makes this option less important.
• Show. This setting controls layer visibility (whether the art on a layer is shown or hidden) and performs the same function as clicking the show/hide icon in the Layers palette.
• Preview. This setting controls the preview setting for the chosen layer. By default, Illustrator’s Preview mode is turned on, but unchecking this option displays the layer in Outline mode.
• Lock. This setting controls layer locking and performs the same function as clicking the lock/unlock icon in the Layers palette itself. Locking a layer effectively prevents you from selecting any object on that layer.
• Print. By default, all layers in a file will print. However, Illustrator allows you to uncheck this option to create a nonprinting layer. This can be useful when you want to add instructions to a template file or to explain how a file should be folded or printed, but you don’t want those instructions to print. Layers that have the Print option turned off appear italicized in the Layers palette.
• Dim Images to. This option allows you to define an opacity setting for placed images. By making placed images dim, you can make it easier to manually trace them. This feature is often used in tandem with the Template function.

The Layer Options dialog allows you to specify settings for each layer—most notably, the name of the layer.