Anyhow, it actually is pretty easy to do in Illustrator, just not as straight forward.  You need to use the power of the appearance panel (which you can read more about here, here and here) and you won’t technically be putting a gradient on a stroke so much as you’ll be making a fill behave as a stroke and giving that fill a gradient fill.  Yeap.

So we take a basic rectangle shape to start with.

I made an object with a dark green fill and no stroke, placed over a red background shape.

Now, with your object selected, go to the flyout menu of the appearance panel, “Add New Fill”  This will become our stroke.

Right now, all that we have is two overlapping fills, exactly the same.  Select the lower one by clicking on it in the appearance panel.  With the lower fill selected, go up to your Effects menu and go to Effect->Path->Offset Path…  The distance you choose is how far out it will offset your path so choose a distance that is half of what you wanted your stroke width to be. (since your stroke would normally straddle the bounds of your object)  You should be looking at something like this:

All that’s left now is to color the fill that you offset with a gradient.  With that fill still selected in the appearance panel, make it a gradient by choosing a gradient out of the swatches, clicking on the gradient swatch in the gradient panel or by using the gradient tool (if you’re on cs4 or above)

Note that the “stroke” is left blank.  The only thing extending beyond the bounds of our object is our offset fill.  This trick can be applied to any other object, including text.

(on this, I also put an inner glow on the main fill to cut it out of the offset fill)

What’s a counter?

First off, a counter is the opening in a letter; The center of an “o”, the opening in an “e”, those are counters.  This trick will also serve to fill in any spaces in a fill such as those created when a “stroke” in text meets between 2 lines of text.

What’s the trick?

There’s no trick to it – it’s just a simple trick.  I put stroke in quotes up there because this is one of the places we use the Offset Path effect to fake a stroke to add capability not allowed on an ordinary stroke.

Here’s the file, if you want to play along at home.

Apply all of your attributes at the Type layer, leaving your character level with no fill and no stroke.

Add a fill, in this case a red fill.

Add a second fill, and move it below the red fill.  Apricot, in this example.  With that lower fill applied, apply the offset path effect to it by going to Effect -> Path -> Offset Path… I set mine to 3.5 pt, rounded.  This should get you to the upper version of the text – with all the holes in it.

Next – the trick.  Still on that lower fill, after the Offset Path, apply Effect -> Pathfinder -> Divide to it.  Nothing should happen just yet. Now in your appearance panel, click on that effect to edit it.  UN-check “Divide and Outline Will Remove Unpainted Artwork” so that your Pathfinder Options look like these:

Easy-peasy.

I should add that this will also work in any circumstance where Effect -> Offset Path leaves holes that you want to fill, not just with text, though that is where I see the need most often.

Once you’ve read over those 3 posts, download this file and have at it.  You might like to adjust the stroke some to make the “holes” a bit more realistic.

This is live editable text, made awesome, by the appearance panel.

That’s live text. Grab the live .ai file. Use your own fonts if you don’t have these.

The basic concept:

Attributes, that is a stroke or a fill, can be applied on a few different levels.  You’re probably accustomed to them applied at the object level, (your ellipse has a stroke and a fill by default) but that’s only one of 4. Attributes can be applied (from highest to lowest power) to the layer, the group, the object, and then in the case of text, to the characters themselves.

Secondary concept:

I said it above, but it’s important so I’ll repeat it: Effects can be applied to an individual stroke or fill. (or to a layer, group or as you know already, to an object.) and the appearance panel gives you access to all of the effects you have applied, allowing you to change them after they’re in place.

Oh, and:

The appearance panel can allow you access to the contents of your layers in a way that lets you modify them all at once.  Not as important, but handy at times so good to know.

Picking apart the example above or “Adding an additional fill to live text”

Grab the .ai file if you want to play along at home.

I’ll start from the bottom and build the simple subtext (playset/adventure) and that will hopefully get you a little grounded and then we’ll be able to dig into the (fairly complex) text with the ice effect applied to it.

We’ll start by just applying a fill as usual. Select the text and pick a color - in this case, I’ve chosen 100|30|00|0

When the cursor is within the text, it will show you the Character level attributes.

Next, we’ll add an additional fill.

With the selection tool (not the type tool) select your type object. From the flyout menu, choose “add new fill” and  it will add a new black fill to the type object above the character level where your blue fill is located.

Now, let’s turn that black fill white, feather it and drop it’s opacity a bit, exposing the blue fill beneath.

With the Type object still selected, (if you need to re-select it, remember to use the selection tool and not the text tool) click in the appearance panel on the fill that you created to select it.  With the fill selected, any effects you apply or attributes you change will only apply to the fill.

Bonus fun – if you apply them to the wrong place, simply drag them around in the appearance panel to the right place.

So go ahead and choose Effect->Stylize->Feather (that’s the upper “stylize” sub-menu – who knows why they thought it was a good idea to have two stylize sections of the same menu)

Here, we’re looking at about a 5px feather, but do as you see fit. After feathering, I also dropped the opacity of the fill to 60% – that setting is in the transparency panel

On to part two!

Open the panel from the window menu (Window -> Align) and make sure the whole panel is visible by clicking either on the little arrows to the left of the word ALIGN or by using the flyout menu option “Show Options” (shown as “Hide Options” in the screenshot since it’s already visible)

So now you see that it’s actually 2 tools tucked in one interface – Align and Distribute.

Starting with the basic Align:

You can either align based on your objects or based on the artboard.  You choose that using the “Align To:” button in the lower right of the panel.

(To start with, be sure that the “Align To:” button is set to “Align to Selection”)

The “Align to Selection” behavior of Align (the default behavior) is pretty straightforward.  Each of the buttons will align either to an edge (left, right, top or bottom) or the center (vertical or horizontal)

Here’s a few objects to demonstrate Align to Selection with -

And here are those objects aligned using each of the 6 align buttons.

By default, the objects will align relative to the bounding box of all the selected objects – in practical terms, that means that if you’re aligning to the left, the leftmost object will stay put and all the others will shift over to that object and if you’re center-aligning, it will align to the average center point.

You can also align to a specific object.

You can fix the position of one of your objects and align the rest of the selected objects in relation to it.  Do this by defining that object as the Key Object.  To do so, you select all the objects you want to align and then just click again on the object you want to be the key object.  (Regular click, not shift click – That’ll just deselect it.)

The method has been the same for as far back as I know, but as of CS4, there is actually a way to tell which object you’ve selected – it gets a bolder selection line around it and the “Align To:” button changes to “Align to Key Object”  This still works in previous versions but there is no visual feedback for the key object.

Align works the same with a key object defined as without, it just keeps the key object locked in place and moves all the others in relation to the key object instead of moving all the objects.

You can also align to the artboard.

Aligning to the artboard is essentially calling the artboard your key object and will move everything based on the boundaries of the artboard.

(It’s hard to see in my cropped screenshot, but those objects are actually aligned to the artboard)

You can also align points to points

To do so, use the direct select tool (the white or hollow arrow) and the last point you select will be considered the key object (though there is no visual feedback)

“Use Preview Bounds”

Way up there in the first screenshot, you see the option to “Use Preview Bounds”.  This will consider the stroke width instead of the center of the stroke itself as the edge of the alignment.

Here’s an example of aligning an object with a 10 point stroke.

Use Preview Bounds will also change the information that you get from the Transform Panel to consider the added dimensions of the stroke (or the added or subtracted dimensions of any effects)

I’ll get to the distribute section of the panel in a later post – it’s past my bedtime.