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.