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)

In this post, I’ll show a more complex example – how you how you can get editable Icy type or Ice covered type in Illustrator using only one type object.

Here is the other text in the sample file (You’ll want to get it here) along with it’s expanded appearance panel to show you what’s going on:

If you don’t have the fonts that I used, substitute your own – I’d recommend a chunky one for the icy effect. FontDiner.com (opens in a new window) has a free one called Huggable that would work here, though maybe not as well as the Coop Black that I’ve got it set in (which is made by the venerable House Industries and is not free)

So you can see by looking at the appearance panel that there are a few fills, each with some effects applied locally, as well as an overall “Glass” filter applied to the entire type object.  You can’t tell from looking at this, but in this example there are no strokes or fills at the character level.

Let’s pick it apart:

There are two fills that are “Scribbled” – one is a gradient that fades up and one fades down – those are the striations in the text.

Then there is the blue to white gradient – that’s the main flavor that you see – it has an Inner Glow applied to it, adding dimension while being behind the striations so adding depth as well

Then there is the lowest fill, which is mostly covered by the blue to white one above – it has the 3d effect applied, adding the white along the top for even more depth.

All the way at the bottom, I’ve applied a glass effect to the whole mcgillicuddy, which gives it a chunky texture.  You might leave that off if your ice was made by someone with a sharper chisel than mine.

I mentioned that attributes could be added to 4 places – Here we’ll cover…

Adding a stroke, fill or effect to an entire layer

I was reminded to do this post when writing the earlier post about non-printing layers because one of the things I do when I create my non-printing template layers is to add a stroke to the layer, so that anything that gets put on the layer will get an extra stroke applied.  This keeps me from accidentally dropping art onto my template layer and then wondering why it isn’t printing. To apply the “caution” stroke to the layer, click on the circle to the right of the layer name to select the layer’s attributes. Now open up your appearance panel and, from the flyout menu, choose “add stroke” This will add a stroke to everything on that layer.

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!

Simply put, they are layers that are visible on screen as you’re working with your file but won’t print. I use them mainly to create margins that I can snap to with smart guides (that’s a whole other post…) I also use them as a place to hold elements of my art that I’m working with bits and pieces of.  Things to eyedropper and such…

To designate a layer as non-printing is simple – just double click on the layer in the layers panel and in the dialog that comes up, un-check “print”. That’s it. Now the layer will be visible on screen and snappable, but won’t print. To show you that the layer is set to not print, the name is shown in italics in the layers panel. (unless you hide the layer, and then for some reason, it’s not.)

I recommend deleting the margin layer as part of your pre-flight routine to be sure that your pressman doesn’t try to print them by mistake.

You could also use the “template” layer but that locks the layer by default, which means it doesn’t snap, making it less useful as a template…  You might use that functionality if you wanted to place an image that you were tracing, though I don’t know why you wouldn’t just put the image on a lower level and lock the image itself…

I use this almost daily in conjunction with Offset Path to create quick and easy margins.

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.