Creating Dynamic Live Text Using the Appearance Panel
Illustrator lets you do all sorts of crazy stuff to your text while still maintaining the ability to edit the words. Let’s see what we can do.
Last week I poked around and asked what kind of things people were interested in learning about Illustrator and its tools. One of the first requests involved creating text with a gradient fill. One way you can accomplish this effect is by generating outlines from the text to make them into basic shapes, then applying the gradient. This works, but you lose the ability to edit the text. This is where the Appearance panel comes in. We’ll cover how to add a gradient to live text, as well as some other cool stuff.
What is the Appearance panel?
The Appearance panel allows you to add multiple strokes, fills, and effects to the same object simultaneously, and to layer these elements and add blend modes to each one individually. The panel can be found under Window > Appearance if it’s not already open. Its menu icon is a filled circle with a dashed stroke, somewhat resembling a sun.
Getting started
Let’s jump in and make something using the Appearance panel to help us out. I’ve chosen to make the word “sunrise” with some different effects applied to it. You can use any word you want. My document is 1920x1080, although your artboard size isn’t super important for this exercise. Select your Text tool (shortcut: T) and click anywhere on your artboard and type your word!
We’ll start by adding some fill effects to this text. Navigate to your Appearance panel with your text block selected and click the New Fill button, which you can find near the bottom-left corner of the panel, between the New Stroke button and the fx button.
So you’ve added a new fill, but it doesn’t look much different…well it’s just black right now, so lets change it. Click the dropdown arrow next to the fill swatch you just added and select the white-to-black default gradient swatch.
Next, let’s change the direction of our gradient to be vertical instead of horizontal. We can do this by navigating to our Gradient panel and changing the angle to -90º.
There’s way too much white here in my opinion, so let’s go back to our Appearance panel and adjust the opacity of that new fill down to 40%. (Alternatively, you could alter the color of the gradient to be darker.)
Let’s get to some strokes. When you added a new fill, you may have noticed an empty stroke was also created. Simply click the swatch area with the red line through it and select something close to a middle-grey option.
We want this stroke to be about 5pt wide, and to be behind the fill. These are both doable in the Appearance panel. Just click and drag the stroke below the fill as if it were a layer, and adjust its stroke to a width you like.
Let’s add a second stroke to this word. This one will have a few more effects applied to it. Click the New Stroke button in the bottom-left corner of the Appearance panel. We’re going to set this stroke to a 2pt width, and select the Orange-Yellow default gradient swatch as its color.
We’ll hop back over to our Gradient panel to make some adjustments to that stroke. I don’t really like the bright yellow, so we can delete that color module and move the next closest one to the far left to take its place.
Now we can separate this stroke from the rest of the text by adding an effect called Offset Path. To do this, navigate back to your appearance panel and select the newest stroke we made. Next, click on the fx button in the Appearance panel and navigate through the dropdown to Path > Offset Path.
This will bring up a small dialogue box allowing you to specify how far away from the current placement you’d like to move your stroke. I’ve selected 6px, but you can check the “preview” box and play with the settings to see what looks right.
The next thing we’ll do is add some shadow elements to our text. In your Appearance panel, select the first stroke we made (the grey one) and click on fx > Stylize > Drop Shadow. I’ve set my parameters to the ones you see to the left in order to display the shadow slightly underneath the text.
The next thing we’ll add is an inner shadow to the text to give it a sunken feel. To do this, select your fill in the Appearance panel and select fx > Stylize > Inner Glow. We don’t really want a glow, we need a shadow. To do that, adjust your settings so that the color is black instead of white, and the blend mode is set to multiply.
The last step is to add a nice dark background shape to our document, so create a rectangle and resize it to fill your artboard. Double click its fill and change it to something very dark but not quite black. I used #1e1e1e. With this new darker background, the orange stroke really stands out.
The advantage of this technique is that everything is still live and editable. You can select your text and retype any word you want, and all the effects we added will still be in place. Hopefully you’ve gained a bit of understanding as to the flexibility that the Appearance panel can offer you.
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