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Adobe Illustrator CS5 : Understanding Appearances (part 1) - Understanding Attributes and Stacking Order

11/27/2012 6:23:42 PM
When you print a file, you aren’t seeing the vector path; you’re seeing the appearance that was specified for that path. An example of an attribute might be a particular fill or stroke. 

When you specify attributes, they appear listed in the Appearance panel. We know this sounds like a late-night infomercial, but if you keep only one Illustrator panel open on your screen while you’re working, make it the Appearance panel. In fact, the Appearance panel is probably the most important panel in Illustrator—ever. To open the Appearance panel, choose Window > Appearance.

Like X-ray vision, the Appearance panel enables you to look at your files and see how they were built or created. This panel also gives you access to every attribute of an object. You can also specify appearance attributes directly from the Appearance panel. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s start with the basics.

Understanding Attributes and Stacking Order

When a path is selected, the Appearance panel displays a thumbnail icon and the word Path, which is the target. The panel also lists—from the bottom up—the target’s opacity, its fill, and its stroke. To the left of each attribute are visibility icons (Figure 1). Clicking an attribute in the Appearance panel enables you to modify it, and clicking an attribute name that is underlined in blue opens the panel that controls all the settings for that attribute. For example, click anywhere to the right of the word Stroke to change its color or weight (Figure 2); click the word Stroke, and the Stroke panel appears, where you can specify cap, join, and dash settings (Figure 3).

Figure 1. The Appearance panel displays the attributes for the targeted item.


Figure 2. Clicking to the right of an attribute gives you the ability to modify its settings.


Figure 3. If an attribute has a blue underline, clicking the attribute displays its respective panel or dialog box.


The order in which the listed items appear in the Appearance panel isn’t arbitrary. From the bottom up, these attributes control the overall appearance of the object. To better illustrate this important concept, let’s first understand a core aspect of how vector objects are drawn in a document.

Objects are drawn in a hierarchy, determined by the order in which you create your art. For example, if you draw one shape and then draw a second shape, the second shape appears higher in the document’s hierarchy than the first object. The easiest way to see this is to create two overlapping objects (Figure 4). In Illustrator, this hierarchy is called the stacking order. You can change an object’s place in the stacking order by selecting it and choosing an item from the Object > Arrange menu (Figure 5).

Figure 4. Modifying the stacking order allows you to overlap artwork in a variety of ways.


Figure 5. Choosing Object > Arrange > Bring to Front moves a selected object to the top of the stacking order.


What most people don’t realize is that a single object also has a stacking order. By default, Illustrator defines an overall Opacity value for an object and then paints the fill and the stroke in that specific order. Why? One reason could be that strokes are painted along the centerline of a path. That means if the weight of a path is set to 20 pt, the weight is distributed so that 10 pts appear on both sides of the path (Figure 6). If Illustrator painted the fill after the stroke, the 10 pts of the stroke width that falls on the inside of the path would be covered or hidden by the fill (Figure 7).

Figure 6. By default, the weight of a stroke is distributed along the centerline of the path.

Figure 7. By painting the stroke first and the fill second, the inner portion of the stroke becomes hidden by the fill.

What’s great about the Appearance panel is that not only can you use it to change the appearance of an attribute, but you can also use it to see the order that those attributes are applied in. Even better, you can change the stacking order. For example, dragging the Stroke attribute in the Appearance panel so that it appears listed beneath the Fill attribute instructs Illustrator to paint the Stroke attribute before it paints the fill (thus hiding half the weight of the stroke, as in Figure 7).

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