Introducing the Graphic Styles panel

- [Instructor] All right, over the course of this chapter we're going to be creating this project right here, which if I were to go up to the view menu and choose outline, or you can press control + Y, or command + Y on a Mac. You can see it contains very little in the way of path outlines. We have this one big line that makes up the entire background, then we have some text that I've converted to outlines along with a few polygons. But thanks to the addition of one fill, 12 strokes, and 11 dynamic effects, we come up with this final piece of artwork, which is all terribly exciting, I assure you. But we're going to start things off in this movie with a practical, if slightly mundane, introduction to the graphic styles panel. And so I'll go ahead and switch over to this base document here, and you can see that we've got one layer called type and another called back, which contains a big rectangle, and so to demonstrate that I'll go ahead and click on a rectangle with the black arrow tool, and then I'll click in the very first color swatch on the far left side of the control panel and I'll change the fill color to something like orange, and you can see that the rectangle updates as well. All right, now I'll go up to the window menu and choose the graphic styles command to bring up the graphic style panel, and notice by default, at least where a basic RGB document is concerned, we have a total of four styles. The first one just pretty much wipes out any special effects, and so notice if I click on it I end up with a white fill. I also have a black stroke, and the best way to see that is to go to the window menu and choose the appearance command, at which point you can see that I have a one point black stroke, and if I twirl it open we have no dynamic effect, and the same goes for the white fill. So, it's essentially a way of wiping out all your dynamic effects and starting over. Now, these next two styles contain little nun swatches, and that tells you that they don't have any fills or strokes whatsoever. All they have is dynamic effects, and I'll show you how that works in a later movie, but for now let's go ahead and click on this final style, jive GS, which applies this effect here, and if you take a look at the appearance panel you can see that we now have two fills, neither of them have any dynamic effects associated with them. The first fill, if I go ahead and click on its swatch, is set to the jive pattern, which is the one and only default pattern included with a basic RGB document. It has transparent areas inside of it, which is why it's sitting on a solid blue fill right here. Now, if I click on this swatch you can see that this particular shade of blue does not appear in the default swatches, but you can go ahead and change it to something else, such as yellow, let's say, in order to replace the color that appears in the translucent areas of the pattern. All right, I'm going to go ahead and click off that panel to hide it, and then I'll select the text. Now, just because we're only seeing four styles inside the graphic styles panel doesn't mean there aren't a lot more to choose from, and you can get to the other ones by clicking on this library icon in the bottom left corner of the panel, and then choosing one of these libraries of graphic styles that ship along with Illustrator. Now, because I have some text selected I'm going to choose type effects in order to bring up this floating panel right here, and then I'll just go ahead and apply one of these guys, such as metal silver, let's say, and we end up with this effect. And in case you're curious how it's put together, then just take a look at the contents of the appearance panel. So, for example, this light stroke right here has a transform effect assigned to it, and if I click on transform I can see that the only settings are two move settings, horizontal and vertical, both of which are set to negative one, which means that we're moving the stroke one point to the left and one point upward. All right, I'll just go ahead and cancel out of that. We also have a fill, by the way, a gradient fill with no dynamic effects that just happens to be sitting on an empty fill, probably just because somebody forgot to throw this away. Now, notice that we're looking at all these styles as thumbnails, and so if I were to click on the fly out menu icon we can see that in addition to the thumbnail view you have a couple of list views to choose from. You also have the option of previewing the effect on a square, as by default, or previewing it on text instead, in which case you replace those squares with letter Ts, which are perhaps more indicative of what you'll get when styling text inside Illustrator. All right, now notice any time I select one of these styles, such as Shirefuchi 1, I not only wipe out all the fills and strokes and dynamic effects here inside the appearance panel, but I also add that style to my graphic styles panel, which tells me that I'm going to save these effects along with this document. All right, and notice here that we've got a white fill sitting on top of a red fill set to offset path, and I continue to that, of course, if I want to by clicking on offset path right there, raising the offset value to let's say 10 points, and then turning on the preview checkbox, at which point I manage to further expand that red fill in back of the white one, and if I like that effect I'll just go ahead and click OK to accept the change. All right, now I really encourage you to try these guys out because they oftentimes be good learning tools, so for example, I could click on this shadow type in order to see that I have white type with a gray shadow in the background, but it's not a traditional drop shadow as we're seeing here. Rather it's a gray fill set to Gaussian blur, and so if I really wanted to turn it into a shadow I would need to click on the word opacity for this bottom fill and change its blend mode from normal to multiply, at which point we end up with a much more credible effect. All right, one more way to preview an effect is to right-click on it, so I'm going to go ahead and right-click and hold on this rough effect here, at which point I will see it actually applied, albeit in a small way, to the word obey, which I have selected inside the document, and then notice if I release I do not add that style to my graphic styles panel, and so if I really liked what I saw, then I would need to go ahead and click on rough in order to add it, and then I might modify my tweak settings by clicking on the word tweak, and let's say I take these guys down to two apiece, both the horizontal and vertical values, and I switch it from relative to absolute so that I'm speaking in terms of points instead of percentages, and then I'll turn on the preview checkbox, and I can see the effect settle down onscreen so that the text is at least more legible, at which point I'll click OK to accept that effect. All right, I'm done with this floating panel, so I'll go ahead and close it, and then I'll go ahead and select my favorite style that I applied, which is Shirefuchi 1, in order to achieve this final effect. And that is my practical, if slightly boring, introduction to the terribly exciting graphic styles panel here inside Illustrator.