Putting It All Together

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 Matrixyou 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 (Figure 3.42). 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.

Figure 3.42. 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.

In complex files, it can be hard to locate certain objects either on your artboard or in your Layers palette. Using the Layers palette to select objects can make it easier to find and select objects on the artboard, and selecting objects on the artboard can also quickly identify where those objects appear in the Layers palette.