Here’s the lousy photo I based the texture off of:

And here’s a screenshot of the textures, including complimentary “grout” colors that I added to each of them with an additional fill, located below the pattern in the appearance panel:

And you can click here to download the .ai file containing the pattern.

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!