The Appearance Palette

Ask me what I think the key is to getting a real grasp on using Illustrator, and I'll tell you it's the Appearance palette. That's because the Appearance palette gives you the information you need to know about your targeted selections. For example, if you select a rectangle, the Appearance palette tells you that a path is targeted and indicates what the fill and stroke of that object are. More important, the Appearance palette tells you whether transparency settings or live effects have been applied to the object (see Figure 7.106). Later in the chapter, we cover exactly what live effects are, but examples are a soft drop shadow and a warp effect.

Figure 7.106. The Appearance palette helps identify the appearance of an object.

The Appearance palette also enables you to add multiple strokes or multiple fills to an object, a group, or a layer. To do so, simply choose Add New Fill or Add New Stroke from the Appearance palette flyout menu (see Figure 7.107).

Figure 7.107. Adding a new (additional) stroke to an object.

We're going to be looking at the Appearance palette a bit more closely later in the chapter while discussing live effects, but I wanted to point out that, just as with the Layers palette, items that appear in the Appearance palette represent the stacking order for those items. By default, an object's stroke appears above the fill, but you can actually change that in the Appearance palette by dragging the fill to appear at the top of the stacking order. Following the same line of thinking, you can click on just the fill to highlight it and then apply an opacity setting that will be applied only to the fill, not to the stroke of that object (see Figure 7.108).

Figure 7.108. An opacity setting applied specifically to the fill of an object.