- [Deke] In this movie, I'll show you how
to create Gradient Type
and I'll also show you how to assign a Dynamic Stroke
that you can move behind the Fill.
Now, both of these operations are fairly
straight-forward once you know how,
but until then, they seem nigh on impossible.
And to demonstrate what I'm talking about,
I'll go ahead and switch over to this document,
and I'll click on my point text
with the Black Arrow tool to select it.
And notice up here on the far-left side
of the Control panel,
that the text has an orange Fill,
currently has no Stroke, however,
so I'm going to dial in a Line Width value of 12 points
and I'm going to change that Stroke to white.
Now let's say I want to get rid
of these harsh corners around the Strokes,
then I would click on the word Stroke
and I would switch the Corner setting to Round Join.
Now, I also want you to notice
that the Strokes are currently centered
around the outlines of the letter forms,
meaning that the Strokes are encroaching on the letters.
So, let's say I want to move the Strokes outside.
Well, one way, normally to work,
would be to change this Align Stroke setting
to Align Stroke to Outside,
but the thing is, this option is not functional
when you're working with Type.
So, instead, I need to move the Stroke
in back of the Fill.
And so, normally, I would do that
by going to the Window menu
and choosing the Appearance command,
but notice here inside the Appearance panel,
we're not even seeing the Fill and Stroke attributes.
If you want to see those attributes,
then you need to double-click
on the word Characters right here,
and that's going to do a couple of things.
It's going to automatically switch you to the Type tool,
it's going to highlight all the text,
and it's going to show you those Fill
and Stroke attributes.
All right, so I want to move the Stroke behind the Fill,
so I'll just go ahead and drag it down, like so,
problem is Illustrator ignores me.
Now, things appear to fare a little bit better if I want
to change the Fill to a Gradient.
So, I'll go ahead and select the Fill,
then I'll click on this orange swatch
and I'll select this default Gradient here, White/Black.
But even though it looks like it's applied
here inside the Appearance panel,
if I were to press the Esc key,
you will see that the Fill is actually black.
So, what in the world is the solution?
Well, the first thing you want to do is double-click
on the word Characters here in the Appearance panel
and then click on a Stroke
and Shift+click on a Fill,
and then drop down to the little trash icon
in the bottom right corner of the Appearance panel
and click on it to get rid of what are ultimately
some useless attributes for our purposes.
Then you want to click on this top item,
which currently reads Type: No Appearance
in order to once again select the entire point text object.
Now, at this point, you need to deliberately add a Fill
or Stroke attribute by, in my case,
clicking on Add New Stroke,
you can just as easily click on Add New Fill,
both of which are located down here
in the bottom left corner of the Appearance panel.
Now, if for some reason that doesn't work,
as it didn't for me,
then click on Add New Fill instead
and you'll get both Fill and Stroke attributes
as we're seeing here.
All right, I'm going to start things off
by changing my Fill to that White/Black Gradient,
which, this time, works just fine.
Then, I'll go up to the Window menu
and choose Gradient in order to bring up the Gradient panel
and I'm going to expand the panel as well
so I can better see what I'm doing,
and I'll go ahead and grab this dark gray,
where the RGB values are all 26,
and I'll drag it and drop it down here
on this last Color Stop
and I'll do the same for the first Color Stop, like so.
And then I'll grab this guy,
where the RGB values are all 204,
and I'll drag it and drop it somewhere near the center
and if necessary, I'll change that Location value manually
to 50%.
And I'm also going to change the Angle value
to a hundred degrees
in order to slant that Gradient like so.
You could just as easily work
with the Gradient tool if you like.
All right, now I want to assign that Stroke,
and so I'll just go ahead and click on that Stroke item
and change the Line Weight value to 12 points once again,
and I'll click on the word Stroke
and switch the Corner to Round Join,
just as I did before,
and now I'll grab the Stroke and drag it
and drop it below the Fill,
and this time it works just fine.
And we no longer have those Strokes
encroaching into the letter forms.
So, this is before, pretty darn ugly,
it looks like something you might create in PowerPoint,
and this is the much more elegant After Effect.
All right, now I really want the Stroke to be black,
so I'm going to click on that Stroke swatch
and change it to black, like so,
and I also want to offset the Stroke a little bit.
And I'm going to do that with the Stroke active
here inside the Appearance panel
by going up to the Effect menu,
choosing Distort & Transform,
and choosing the Transform command,
or as I've said many times,
if you've loaded D keys you have a keyboard shortcut
of Ctrl+e here on a PC
or Command+e on the Mac.
Now I'll turn on the Preview checkbox,
I'll click into Horizontal Move value,
and I'll press the down arrow key three times in a row
to nudge that Stroke to the left
and then I'll tab to the Vertical value
and press the up arrow key three times in a row
to nudge that Stroke downward,
so we have this nice offset Stroke
that's lending the appearance of depth to our letters.
All right, now I'll click OK to accept that change
and then finally, with the Type selected,
so I'll click on the word Type at the top
of the Appearance panel,
and I'm going to go ahead and switch to the Stroke panel,
just so we have a little more room to work.
And then, I'll return to the Effect menu, choose Stylize,
and choose Drop Shadow
or if you loaded D keys, you can press Ctrl+Alt+d
or Command+Opt+d on a Mac.
And I came up with these values right here,
I set the Color to black, the Mode to Multiply,
the Opacity value's 100%, the X Offset is negative five,
the Y Offset is positive five,
and the Blur is five points.
And notice, if I turn on the Preview checkbox,
that that gives us this soft Drop Shadow
that accentuates the offset of the Stroke,
at which point I'll click OK to accept that change.
All right, so ultimately, it's easy peasy, lemon squeezy.
Just remember, if you want to create Gradient Type
with a Dynamic Stroke that you can move behind the Fill,
then you need to deliberately add Fill
and Stroke attributes to your entire text object
from the Appearance panel.