- [Voiceover] In this movie, I'll show you how to target
and format an entire group of objects.
And our purpose here is going to be to
take each one of these groups of letters
and stroke them in mass as we're seeing right here.
And so I'll start by showing you
what a standard stroke looks like.
I'll go ahead and zoom in on the text
in the upper left corner of the document
and I'll click on anyone of the letters with the black
arrow tool and because they're all grouped together
that selects every single one of these two rows of letters.
Now, I'm going to press control "H" or command "H"
on a MAC to hide the anchor points
so we can better see what we're doing.
And I'm going to change the line weight
up here in the control panel to 2.5 points
and as you can see the stroke is black
by default which works out well.
So now I'll click on the word "stroke",
I want to get rid of those sharp miter joints right there
and so I'll change the corner to a round joint
and I also want to move the strokes outwards
so I'll go ahead and select a line stroke to outside.
And while that looks pretty darn good,
notice these strange interactions
that we have between letters
and that's because we're working with compound paths
that are being stroked independently
which is not what we want.
Instead what we want to do is stroke
the entire group at once and here's what that looks like.
I'll go ahead and press control "Z" or command "Z"
on a MAC as many times as it takes
to get rid of those strokes and I'll zoom out
just a little bit so that we can see all the letters.
And what we want to make sure is happening is that
the group is targeted.
So notice that we have a double circle here
where this meatball is concerned
on the right side of the screen
and that tells us that the group,
and not the path outlines themselves,
is going to be the target of our formatting.
So notice if I twirl open the group,
these two meatballs do not have extra circles around them.
So, in other words, they are not directly targeted.
That is to say they're not targeted
if we work from the appearance panel.
So what you need to do is go up to the window menu
and choose appearance to bring up the appearance panel.
Now the appearance panel is a huge topic,
which is why I'm devoting the very next chapter to it,
so you can consider this as
a kind of preview of coming attractions.
But what we need to do is make sure
we're seeing the word "group" at the top of the panel
and then drop all the way down
to this lower right icon which says "add new stroke"
and click on it
and that will add a stroke to the group
as opposed to the letters themselves.
Now I'm going to take that value up to twice 2.5,
which would be of course 5 points,
in order to make quite the mess of the letters.
I will also click on the word "stroke"
and change the corner to a round joint.
I will not, however, change the
alignment of the stroke because I can't.
Instead what I'm going to do is grab the stroke right there
and I'm going to drag it, not below fill,
but all the way below content,
which are the contents of the group.
So, in other words, we're going to stroke the group
behind the letters in order to produce
this effect right here, which not surprisingly
is exactly what we want.
Alright, now let's go ahead
and do the same thing to these guys.
So I'll go ahead and click on any one of the letters
to select all of them
and just to make sure everything is selected properly,
I'll press control "H" or command "H" on a MAC
to bring back the anchor points.
Sure enough everything's there,
so I'll press control "H" or command "H" again
to hide the anchor points.
And then, since we're already inside the appearance panel,
all you need to do is drop down to the add new stroke icon
and click on it way down there in the
bottom left corner of the panel.
And this time, we're going to change the
line weight to three points and change the
color of the stroke from this dreadful black,
I'm going to have to check if that's
a mistake in the other one too,
but I'll change it to white like so
and then, I'll click on the word "stroke"
and switch the corner to a round joint
and then finally, I'll grab the stroke and drag it
and drop it to below the contents
in order to produce this awesome effect here
in which not a single layer is interrupted by the stroke
and none of the strokes overlap each other.
Alright, let's check on the color of that stroke, however.
Notice, if you will, you have to look pretty closely here,
that this is what's known as a weak black,
which in sometimes, even though we're working in RGB,
be a carryover of having worked inside of a CMYK document
and so, I'm just going to go ahead
and click on these letters.
I know that they're selected properly
and I'm going to go over to the stroke item
and I'm going to shift click on this color swatch
in order to bring up the RGB values
and notice they are not zero,
every one of them should be zero but they're not.
We've got 39 for red and 37 for the other two.
You can go ahead and dial them in manually if you want to
or you can click on this little black swatch here
and that's going to zero out all the values
and give us a so called "rich black"
which of course is exactly what we want.
Alright, now press control "H" or command "H" on a MAC
to bring back the anchor points because,
otherwise, that's a stape that's saved along
with the document and then I'll press
control zero or command zero on a MAC to zoom out
and I'll pressure control shift "A" or command shift "A"
on a MAC to de-select my artwork.
And that's how you target and format
an entire group of objects, specifically by adding a stroke
here inside the appearance panel
and moving the stroke below the contents
here inside Illustrator.