Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

Designed for

Illustrator

Repurposed

from

Photoshop

What I love about dynamic effects—also known as “live” effects—

is that very few Illustrator users know they exist. And even those

that do have only the sketchiest idea of how powerful and fl exible

they can be. My hope is that once you try them out for yourself, it

won’t be so much the effects that come alive as your imagination.

The Best (and Worst) Effects

The Effect menu contains more than 120 commands, all of which

produce different results, nearly half of which were designed for

Photoshop (and have little practical application in Illustrator), and

some of which refuse to work except under very specifi c conditions.

In other words, they’re not the friendliest bunch.

Fortunately, Illustrator does a nice job of dividing them into cat-

egories. And a few of the effects are exceedingly useful. Here’s how

the Effect menu (pictured in Figure 10-2, with the best submenus

highlighted in red) breaks down, from most useful to least:

•

Effect→Distort & Transform→Transform lets you nudge, scale,

rotate, and otherwise transform whole objects (or individual

stroke and fi ll attributes) from a single dialog box. Transform

is heads and shoulders the most practical of the dynamic ef-

fects, which is why—if you loaded my dekeKeys (see page xviii

of the Preface)—I’ve assigned it a keyboard shortcut of Ctrl+E

(on the Mac, -E) for Effect. You’ll be seeing a lot of this one.

•

Effect→Stylize→Drop Shadow casts a shadow behind a se-

lected path. Many complain that drop shadows get overused,

but they’re overused for good reason: They help offset objects

and create a sense of depth. For dekeKeys loaders, again I have

a shortcut: Ctrl+Alt+E (or -Option-E).

• Most of the other commands in the Effect→Distort & Trans-

form submenu (that is, besides Transform) twist and turn path

outlines. I long ago christened these the path wigglers. Because

that’s what they do, and they’re very good at it. Pucker & Bloat

is just one example.

•

Effect→Stylize→Scribble breaks a fi ll, stroke, or both into a

series of back-and-forth crosshatch lines. It offers an intricate

dialog box, but it’s one of the best commands in all of Illustrator.

• Effect→Stylize→Round Corners smooths away the acute cor-

ners along a selected path. And brilliantly, it does so on-the-

fl y, so that you can make the corner more or less round at a

moment’s notice.

Figure 10-2 .

331

The Best (and Worst) Effects

•

The remaining Effect→Stylize commands ( Feather,

Inner Glow, Outer Glow) blur path outlines and add

edge effects. If Feather doesn’t give you quite the

effect you’re looking for, try Effect→Blur→Gaussian

Blur from the Photoshop effects.

• The three commands in the Effect→3D submenu

transform one or more 2D paths into a 3D illus-

tration. Illustrator’s 3D opportunities are limited,

but with care you can create some eye-popping

effects, as you’ll learn in “Creating 3D Text and

Graphics” on page 372.

• The commands in the Effect→Warp submenu let

you distort text blocks and other objects without

requiring you to jump through hoops when you

later need to apply edits.

•

Effect→Crop Marks appends dynamic crop marks

to a selected path, group, or layer. It’s great for

business cards.

Here’s an interesting one: Normally, Illustrator doesn’t

allow you to stroke an imported photograph. But you can

force a stroke to frame a photo with the help of an effect.

Select the placed image, and click the

icon in the

bottom-left corner of the Appearance panel. Then, with

the Stroke attribute highlighted, choose Effect→Convert

to Shape→Rectangle. Select the Relative radio button,

set the Extra Width and Extra Height values to 0, and

click OK. I’ve taken the liberty of diagramming the entire

process in the gigantic and terrifying Figure 10-3.

• The rest.

If that seems glib, permit me to elaborate: Although

on occasion powerful, the commands in the Path and

Pathfi nder submenus are designed less for creative pur-

poses and more for problem solving.

Here’s an example. Start with a selected block of point text,

with a slim drop shadow, as shown at the top of Figure 10-4.

Select the text with the black arrow tool and apply a stroke

from the Appearance panel. With the Stroke attribute

selected, choose Effect→Path→Offset Path. Enter an Offset

value and click OK to move the stroke outward. Problem is,

the strokes intersect each other. To reconcile the overlaps,

choose Effect→Pathfi nder→Add. Figure 10-4 tells the story.

Select an imported photo, .. .

and apply Effect

→Convert to Shape→Rectangle

with the settings shown below.

add a new stroke from the Appearance panel, .. .

Figure 10-3 .

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Lesson 10: The Amazing World of Dynamic Effects