Written by Shelly Ahoe on December 16, 2023

Appearance – Setting Up Your Workspace

The Appearance panel allows you to add multiple strokes and fills with varying opacities and effects. We will look at this more closely in Chapter 8. Refer to Figure 4-34.

Figure 4-34. Appearance panel collapsed and open with its menu

Graphic Styles

With the Graphic Styles panel, once you have created an Appearance, it can be turned into a graphic style. Graphic styles are like the Layer styles in Photoshop, but they do have some slight differences in the way they are created. Refer to Figure 4-35 and Figure 4-36.

Figure 4-35. Graphic Styles panel collapsed and open with its menu in Illustrator

Figure 4-36. Styles panel in Photoshop

We will look at this panel in Illustrator more closely in Chapter 8. I will mention styles again in regard to Photoshop in Volume 3. In Illustrator, the panel’s menu and the icon on the lower left of the panel also have a link to various Graphic Style libraries that you can modify. Refer to Figure 4-35.

Layers

The Layers panel, along with the Toolbars, Control, and Properties panels, are probably the most important panels in Illustrator. The Layers panel stores all the shapes, objects, and symbols that you can apply graphic styles or live effects to when they are stored on separate layers or sublayers. These layers can be organized and do have some similarities to Photoshop layers, but differences as well. We will see how layers work in the Illustrator Layers panel in Chapters 5 through 9. Refer to Figure 4-37 and Figure 4-38.

Figure 4-37. Layers panel collapsed and open with its menu and the Layer Options dialog box in Illustrator

Figure 4-38. Layers panel in Photoshop

Similar to Photoshop, the updated Illustrator Layers panel has added a new search feature so that you can find layer or object names easily using various search filters, which is great when working with a lot of layers.

Asset Export

The Asset Export panel is useful for later exporting your design creations in a variety of file formats for the web. We’ll talk about those options briefly in Volume 3. Refer to Figure 4-39.