Chapter 11: Effectively Keeping Up Appearances, with Style(s)
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Not to worry: This wealth of information isn’t nearly as confusing as your income tax form. Here’s why: All along, in the course of creating your artwork, you’ve been putting all these informational tidbits into the Appearance panel. You tell Illustrator to add info to this panel every time you set an option that changes the way your object looks (such as stroke, fill, and transparency). The Appearance panel faithfully records all this information all the time, even if you don’t look at it. (Good thing it doesn’t record everything appearance related, like that incredibly fashionable bathrobe you’re wearing as you read this.)
Reading the Appearance panel The (much larger) Appearance panel shown in Figure 11-8 displays accumulated information about a particular object. What does it all mean? Is it important? Why oh why did Natalie ever leave the Maniacs? I’ll answer the first questions, and leave the last one for a Behind the Music special. To make sense of all the Appearance panel’s information, peruse the following list of its features: ✓ Target: This feature identifies the type of graphic that the information in the Appearance panel refers to. Typically this feature reads Object or Path, meaning the information in the panel refers to (or will be applied to) an appearance that Figure 11-8: The Appearance panel displays is or will be applied to a single info about the object, such as stroke and fill selected object. When you select data. a group or a layer, the target reads Group or Layer. If text is selected, the target reads Type. The target section is always at the top. A tiny thumbnail image emulates the appearance of the graphic. ✓ Global effects: These effects apply equally to, and affect all aspects of, the entire object. Whenever you apply Effects or Transparency settings (as I described earlier in this chapter) without using the Appearance panel, you apply the effects as global effects. Although they’re usually the first attribute you apply, they always appear near the bottom of the list in the Appearance panel.
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