From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

687 Using stylistic sets in Illustrator CC

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

687 Using stylistic sets in Illustrator CC

- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll show you how to switch between different stylistic sets, in this case, associated with a multicolored font, Trajan Color Concept, here inside Illustrator CC 2018 or later. That's very important. So earlier versions of the program do not support this feature. And as it turns out, it's easier to pull off inside Illustrator than it is inside Photoshop, but it's strangely tricky as well. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and grab the Type tool, which, of course, you can get by pressing the T key, and I'll select this first letter A. And as long as my cursor is hovered over the selection, I'll see this tiny pop-up panel, complete with a list of alternate characters. If I move my cursor off the selection, then that panel disappears. But notice that I'm only seeing five characters in all. The one I'm looking for isn't here, so I'll go ahead and click on a right-pointing arrowhead to bring up the Glyphs panel set to Alternates for Current Selection. If it's not set that way for you, just go ahead and choose this first command, at which point, I'll see the turquoise version of the character, and I'll double-click on it in order to switch out that character like so. And then, I'll go ahead and highlight the double T ligature, and notice this time, Illustrator offers that ligature in the tiny pop-up panel as well as up here in the alternates. And so I'll just go ahead and double-click on that double T ligature, and that will replace both of the Ts like so. All right, so that's one way to work. Here's another easier way. I'll go ahead and press the Escape key to accept that change, and I'll hide the Glyphs panel, which, by the way, does offer a list of the stylistic sets, with the exception of gold, because gold is the default setting. So while we're seeing Stylistic Set 1, Silver, all the way down to Stylistic Set 20, Solid, there are really 21 sets because Gold is not pictured. So I could switch to Turquoise here, but that is not going to reformat the text. That's just going to give me other characters to choose from. To reformat the text, what you do is hide that Glyphs panel, and then go up to the Window menu, choose Type, and choose OpenType. And then with your text selected, you want to move to this bottom right icon, which reads Stylistic Sets, and then go ahead and click on it, and you will see a list. And so I could go ahead and choose Turquoise if I like in order to reformat all the text in turquoise. That messes up my double N ligature, however, and so I'll bring it back just by turning on Standard Ligatures like so. All right, now this way, you could easily switch between different sets, just by selecting, for example, Wood, which has some wood grain running through it, as we can see right here. But notice what happens if I decide to check out Dark Gray. I don't see any change, and that's because we've got a bunch of styles heaped on top of each other. So the first selection is always going to override the other ones. If you want to be able to see, in our case, Dark Gray, then you need to turn off Silver, and then go ahead and turn off Wood, and then go ahead and turn off Turquoise. Although, that does end up leaving a couple of turquoise letters right there, and that's because we set them to turquoise from the Glyphs panel. If you want them to be dark gray instead, press the T key to switch back to the Type tool, and then highlight the A, for example, and switch it back to the very first A, which is gold. And as you can see, gold always appears at the bottom of the stack. So it's there, but it's getting covered up by dark gray. And then you can select the double T and change it back to gold as well, at which point, all the characters are double gray like so. All right, so I'm going to press the Escape key to switch back to the black arrow tool so all of the text is selected. And then I'll click on this bottom right icon here inside the OpenType panel, and I will turn off Dark Gray, just to make sure it's not heaped on top of the other colors anymore. And I'll try out one of the other settings such as Yellow, which is going to brighten the letters, as we're seeing right here, but I'm really interested in green. And so I'll start by turning off Yellow, and then I will choose Green in order to achieve this effect right here. And again, I've lost not only my double N ligature, but also the double T, and so I'll just go ahead and click on this bottom left icon, Standard Ligatures, in order to bring them back. All right, now let's say I want to share this document with somebody who's using an older version of Illustrator. In that case, I need to convert my text to outlines. Now, in Photoshop, a shape layer can have just one fill. In Illustrator, when you're converting to vector-based path outlines, you can have as many different fills as you like. So notice if I go up to the Type menu and choose Create Outlines that I don't end up ruining the effect at all. And this also gives you a chance to figure out how these effects are put together. And so notice the word Group on the far left side of the control panel. I want to ungroup these letters, so I'll go up to the Object menu and choose the Ungroup command. That still leaves a bunch of groups, but at least one letter at a time is grouped instead of all the letters. And so I'll just go ahead and click off any letter to deselect it. Then I'll click on the A, for example, and double-click on it in order to enter the group isolation mode. And then I'll just go ahead and zoom in here, and I'll grab this path outline, and I'll drag it over so that you can see the green letter in the background. You can also drag this guy up, and this guy over, and so forth. There's another guy right here who's responsible for this little bit of shading, and that's actually a pretty big path, but it's filled with this slight gradient at this location here. Now, some of the effects are more complicated than this, but they all depend on multiple path outlines to express each and every letter. All right, I don't really want this guy torn apart, so I'll just press Control + Z or Command + Z on a Mac a bunch of times in order to restore the letter A, and then you can just press Control + Z again, Command + Z on a Mac, in order to escape out of the group isolation mode. And now I'll just ahead and click off the letters to deselect them, and I'll press Control + 0, or Command + 0 on a Mac, to center my zoom. And that's how you switch between different stylistic sets, in this case, associated with the multicolored font, Trajan Color Concept, here inside Illustrator CC 2018 and moving forward.

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