If you are like me, you have probably over-looked one of Adobe Illustrator’s most powerful features, the appearance palette (it is actually a window but I like to refer to them as palettes).
In this palette lies a great wealth of ways to control and manipulate vector objects within Illustrator, and is even useful in creating a reusable graphic styles. In this tutorial we will take a look at some of the functionality that makes the Appearance Palette so useful, and describe ways to save your effects for quick use in other projects.
Initial Setup
Bring your Appearance Palette forward as we will be using it throughout this tutorial. You might even want to expand the length of the palette to about twice its size to make viewing all the layers easier. Notice I said “layers”. The fills and strokes in the Appearance Palette act just like layers in a sense. But, compared to layers... the fills and stroke views can’t be turned on or off without trashing the complete stroke or fill or dropping opacity down, and they cannot be labelled like layers for easy reference. Keep this in mind as you work.
I am going to use a lesson from Ergodraw.com on creating a 3D ball effect as inspiration for this tutorial. I wanted to use their lesson as an example of just what can be done with the Appearance Palette versus using layers. My method has a couple of drawbacks and a couple of advantages compared to the layers method shown at Ergodraw and I will point out these differences later in the lesson. In their original lesson, the user was instructed to create 4 layers each containing the same duplicated circle filled with orange hue of your choice. We will be doing the same, except we are going to create multiple fills rather than layers in the Appearance Palette, and we are going to create them one at a time since we cannot label or hide view easily.
Getting Started
So, starting out... draw one circle and size it roughly to 140 points in diameter. Make sure it is filled with an orange hue (just for this exercise... you can change it to another color for different results if desired). Leave the stroke for this circle blank. If you select this circle, you should see that we have one fill with the orange color and a stoke with nothing (Example A). Go to the flyout menu in the Appearance Palette (upper-right-corner button) and select Add New Fill (Example B) or you can make it easier on yourself and just select the fill layer in the Appearance Palette (while the circle is still selected) and choose Duplicate Item, which will duplicate the orange fill with new fill on top. The same can be also be done by dragging the fill layer to bottom of palette and releasing it over the button to the left of the trash can located at the bottom of palette, or just by selecting the fill or stroke and clicking the button. The latter 2 methods work best, because if you choose New Fill from the flyout menu, you also have to select the same orange hue to fill it, adding more steps to the process.
Now if we look at our Appearance Palette, we should have 2 fill layers that both contain the orange color we started with and a stroke layer with no color (as seen in Example C). If you selected New Fill from the flyout menu instead of duplicating our original fill and don’t have orange for the top fill layer simply select the top fill layer and then select the same orange hue for the color fill that we used in the first step. Then it should look like the Appearance Palette in Example C.
Our circle shouldn't look very different right now. Its still the same circle of orange we started with, only now with 2 stacked fill layers. This is where you will begin to see the magic of the Appearance Palette. Select the top most fill layer of orange and then go to the transparency palette. We want to set the blend mode of this fill to Multiply. Just like any other vector object in Illustrator, we can change the opacity, and the blend mode of our fills and strokes within the appearance palette. Setting our top fill to Multiply doubles the orange fill to make a darker and more saturated orange color because it lays on top of the solid orange we created before. The results of this operation will be visible on our circle and in the Appearance Palette (Example D). Notice how the top layer now has a subgroup below it containing our transparency settings? You can click this fill layer and change the opacity or blending modes again in the Transparency Palette later if desired (Example E).
Building Up Detail
Select the bottom color fill. We want to use this to start adding some depth to the circle and we do this with the same method as the Ergodraw lesson. With the bottom fill selected, select Effect > Stylize > Inner Glow. As everyone should know by now, anything from the Effect menu applied to a vector object in Illustrator shows up in the Appearance Palette for the object and can be edited or deleted at any time in future. Using this same great feature, we can apply these same effects to individual fills or strokes within the Appearance Palette, allowing for the same editing capabilities later if desired. Using the settings shown in Example F as a reference, change the blend mode to Multiply and select a dark color or black for the glow and spread it out about 18pt to get the example shown (Example G) with about 60-70% opacity.
Once you have added the INNER GLOW EFFECT from the menu, you should see this effect show up in the Appearance Palette on the bottom fill layer as a subgroup. The dark orange circle should look very similar to Example G. It should be easy to see how this process works now - We are adding layers within the Appearance Palette to build our 3D looking button. Should you apply the wrong effect to the wrong fill... don’t worry. You can reposition the fill and stroke layers or delete layers and effects almost the same as in our layers palette.
Going off the beaten track...
Now this is where my lesson takes a left turn from other more traditional routes. 
I have a few more steps to get the look of my finished button. Once you are comfortable with this process and understand how to use the Appearance Palette to its fullest potential, you may find other methods that are shorter or work better for your purposes. Feel free to experiment with this but, for now, we will be doing things my way. Haha!
Our next step is to create a gradient fill which we will screen over the previous layers to help give the circle more shape and dimension. So start by duplicating the top most fill again. Once you have duplicated this fill, change the Opacity settings that were attached from the previous fill. Let’s set this third fill layer to Screen and about 70% Opacity. Now go to your swatches and open the Gradient Swatch palette. There you should see a default set of gradients. Choose the white to black radial for fill to replace the orange fill. Now, to deepen the color effect... go to the Gradient Palette while our gradient fill is still selected in the Appearance Palette and add some muted yellow to the white on one end, and maybe adjust the solid black on the other end to more dark brown (Example H), or leave the other end of the gradient black.
Let’s add another EFFECT to this fill! Go to Effect > Distort & Transform > Transform. This will bring up a dialog box as shown below (Example I). Here we want to resize our gradient circle to about 85% using the scale sliders or typing the values into the horizontal and vertical values. We also want to move this circle's offset from the others to give it a more realistic lighting effect, as if the light was coming from an angle. To do this move the sliders to nudge this circle so its up on the left top corner of the other circles. You can click the preview button to see the changes as you make them. Once you click OK you will see this effect show up in the Appearance Palette as a subgroup under the top most fill, and it too can be edited later with ease by double clicking the Transform effect under the fill (Example J). You should also notice our circle showing more depth now. I was still not satisfied with the look so here I duplicated the orange fill layer with the Multiply blend applied. The top most fill layer is left with Multiply but I drop the Opacity down to 71%. Then, the middle of the the 3 orange fill layers is changed from Multiply to Color Burn and still 100% Opacity. I also got rid of the Transform effect by selecting the effect and clicking the TRASH CAN in the bottom corner of the palette. Remember, all circles in these files are vector objects. Study their Appearance Palette profiles if having any trouble.
Ok... is it starting to look 3D yet? The results may vary according to the colors used for the original circle and the gradient. Don’t forget we can go back and change any of those colors by selecting the object first, and then selecting the fill layer containing the color or gradient we wish to change. Then use the Color, Swatches, or Gradient palette to make your color changes.
From here you can add more fill layers to get your desired coloration. This is another good time for experimenting. Try layering fills with different transparency blend modes to create unique and complex looking results. Take a look at my pre-made buttons (Example L & M) to see all the different layers I used to get the final result in the Appearance Palette.
Let’s continue with highlights for a shiny look. I will be skipping the pics for these steps now. Create a NEW fill from the flyout in the Appearance Palette or DUPLICATE a fill. We want to make this either a white or a very light and bright tint of a color for the highlight, so set a new color for the fill. To get the one spot glow as my buttons show, you can choose 2 methods. You can use the transform effect again to resize the circle into a smaller oval as shown and nudge it into the upper left or right corner for offset lighting. But the soft edge effect can be done by applying a Feather effect to the fill or as my example, apply a gradient for the fill and change the blend mode to Screen. You might even take the Opacity to 95% or whatever works best for you.
Variations
If you wanted to produce a 3 oval effect that looks more shiny, simply create the same oval but do not feather as much or don’t use gradient for the fill and reduce Opacity to around 30%. Duplicate this highlight fill 2 more times but reduce and reshape the ovals to about an 1/8th of original highlight but increase their Opacity to around 90%. Then position them using the Move sliders in the Transform effect box (Example M).
To add a bevel to your button like the examples, just create new fill layers or duplicate fills and move to the bottom of the stack. From there, you can either enlarge the circle using the Transform function again or you can go to Effect > Path > Offset Path and define the width to expand. You can then fill with your choice of gradients or colors, but I chose to get a metal looking bevel with rounded edges (Example L). You can select the example button to see how I layered 2 metal looking gradients (1 radial and 1 linear) with Gaussian Blue effect added to top fill layer to blend with bottom fill layer in the Appearance Palette. You can see another type of bevel in Example M.
I hope this has been enlightening and helpful. I have found this to be great way to work with common elements. Using the Appearance Palette to build our FX allows us to save the combination of fill and stroke layers as GRAPHIC STYLES which can be used on other shapes and objects or save to a library for use later. Simply drag your object when the look is complete to the Graphic Styles palette. This will create a new icon in the palette that resembles the look of the object. Now its possible to apply this effect to other shapes or text. For some inspiration, try applying Warp Effects to the entire object as in my Examples N and O. You can also experiment with applying the effect to just one fill layer or stroke too. You may find that this give you a great start for an evil monster or weird button. And my final tip.... if you select text with the arrow tool, you can set multiple fill and strokes for the text. Move all strokes to the back of all fills to retain the weight of the font when stroking. Great for stacking larger and larger strokes on text.
Source: biorust.com
