Master the Appearance Panel in Illustrator: A Guide for Advanced Design Control

In this post, I will teach you how to use the Appearance panel, a powerful (and often underrated) tool for setting up and editing the visual attributes of your artwork from multiple fills to multiple strokes, effects, and more! This panel is easy to learn and super easy to use! I’ll throw in a little bonus at the end, so read on – and no peeking, it spoils the surprise!

This post is based on my recently updated Illustrator Advanced course. When you become a BYOL member, you gain access to this course as well as my 30+ additional courses on Photoshop, Lightroom, InDesign, Figma, and more. As a BYOL member you will also enjoy personalized support, earn certificates, and tackle exciting community challenges. Head here to sign-up!

Let's get started!

How to use the Attributes Panel in Illustrator

We’ll start by covering the basics of the Appearance panel, like color, multiple strokes, opacity, etc so you feel comfortable with these first steps before moving on to more complex features, but know that you can apply gradients and textures, transform shapes, add effects, and more, all from this awesome tool! Let’s see how this works!

We’ll start with a file available to BYOL students in the Illustrator Advanced Course Exercise Files folders. 

First, we click on our star using the Selection tool (shortcut ‘V’) and add a basic stroke around it. We can type a number in the Weight field or click the up or down arrows to change the stroke’s weight. Next, we can click on Stroke to edit some of its attributes, in this example we will just change the Align Stroke to Outside.

We are going to add a second stroke to our star. How do we do that? Some of you may be thinking: “well, we can expand appearance and add a new stroke”. But what if I want a third stroke or what if we are working with a text object and want to keep it editable?

Time to open the Appearance Panel! “Wait a minute, weren’t we already working on the Appearance panel, over at Properties to the right of our screens?” Yes, but that is a simplified version of the Appearance panel. We are in Advanced mode now, so we need advanced tools as well.

Let’s click on Window on the top menu bar and then select Appearance. We can also use the speed-of-light shortcut Shift + F6 on both Mac and PC.

Let’s see how our star’s look is represented inside the Appearance panel. From top to bottom, we can immediately understand that our star:

• Is a path shape

• Has a 20-point weight black Stroke, aligned outside of the path

• Has a solid orange-ish fill color

• Opacity is set to default

What else can we find in the Appearance panel? Let’s break down the options at the bottom of the panel.

• Add New Stroke and Add New Fill - Click on the icons to add a new Stroke or Fill layer to the selected object.

• Add New Effect - This option allows us to add effects to the Appearance panel, offering the same features we find when we click Effect on the top menu bar: a wide range of transformations and effects that we can apply to the selected object.

• Clear Appearance - Removes all the attributes applied to the selected object.

• Duplicate Selected Item - Duplicates a specific attribute inside the Appearance panel.

• Delete Selected Item - Removes a specific attribute inside the Appearance panel.

Time to add a second stroke. Let’s click on the Add New Stroke button in the lower options bar. A new Stroke layer is added, ready for editing.

We can adjust any attribute layer’s position by clicking and holding the mouse button over it and dragging the layer structure up or down. Let’s drag the new layer to the top and make some changes. We’ll be overlapping strokes, so let’s make the second a bit larger than the first, add a contrasting color, and set alignment to outside.

Why can’t we see the first stroke? Is it gone? There is nothing wrong, don’t worry. Remember layers? We can click and drag the top layer one step down, exactly like we do in the Layers panel to switch their order. Look for the blue line that stands between layers and release the mouse button to place the layer in its new spot.

Let’s add a third stroke to create a more impactful effect on our star layer. All we need to do is repeat the previous steps. Click the Add New Stroke button, set layer order, and change color and weight. We can also set Align Stroke to Outside and… let’s see what happens when we change something else. We’ll set Corners to Bevel Join, trimming off the sharp points.

It looks pretty cool, but let’s keep it simple for now and go back to the sharp points.

How to Combine the Eyedropper Tool and the Appearance Panel

Using the Appearance panel brings clear workflow advantages. Let’s draw a new shape. A circle, a triangle, whatever you prefer. I’ll draw a circle with the Ellipse tool, holding down Shift on both Mac and PCto keep it proportional. Select the circle with the Selection tool and click on the Eyedropper tool button on the left toolbar. Shortcut time: hit the ‘I’ key to bring it up. With the Eyedropper tool selected click once on the star shape we’ve just edited.

Something went wrong. There are some parts missing. Quick and easy fix: double-click the Eyedropper tool to open its Options panel. Click on the Appearance checkbox to make sure all attributes get picked when you sample the shape with the Eyedropper. Click OK to finish setting up.

Let’s give it another shot and see if, on the second time, all attributes are duplicated into the new ellipse shape.

Timeout #1

New to Illustrator? Need to learn more about drawing tools, basic shapes, fills, strokes, and opacity settings? Join my Illustrator Essentials Zero to Hero Course and kickstart your professional vector designer journey! 

How to Drag and Drop Attributes from the Appearance Panel

Let’s draw a third shape inside our artboard. I’ll draw a polygon this time, you can follow along or create something entirely different, feel free to get creative! Instead of the eyedropper tool, I’ll teach you an alternative method to duplicate attributes into a new shape, just as quick and easy!

With the customized ellipse selected, move your mouse cursor to the Appearance panel, click and hold the thumbnail preview above the attribute layers and drag it all the way to the polygon. The mouse cursor changes once you hover above the new shape, showing a dashed square stroke and a ‘+’ icon. Release the mouse button.

Awesome! This is workflow heaven, right? There’s still more magic to come!

Let’s use this door sign we’ve designed in my Illustrator Advanced classes. As we can see below, there is a transparent dark rectangle placed between the pattern background and the text object. We’ve added this extra object to add contrast and improve legibility.

Let’s replicate this contrast effect in seconds. With the pattern shape selected, we click the Add New Fill button in the Appearance panel.

Next, we change the Fill color to black and click on the drop-down icon next to Fill to open Opacity settings. Adjust the opacity value to 35% and there we have it! Without needing any additional object to create the darkened effect that makes the text stand out from the background. This saves time, document size and computer resources. Cool, huh?

How to Transform Text with the Appearance Panel

This is so exciting! No time to catch our breath, let’s test how the Appearance panel can help us with typography!

Add a text object to the artboard. Pick a bold font for extra impact and give it any color you want. It’s not relevant because we will be sampling the star’s attributes into the text object in the next step.

I’m sure you know what to do next. That’s right! With the text selected, grab the Eyedropper tool and click on the star shape. Boom!

We can adjust layer order to make the Fill color land on top of the strokes and reach that solid and finished look. So nice!

Wait a minute! After adding fill color and three strokes, is this text still editable?

Bonus Tip! How to Save Attributes as Graphic Styles

Alright, one last tip!

Let’s say we’ve spent a lot of time going around all these attributes, we love what we’ve done, and we want to keep it for future use. Do we have to go back to previously edited graphics or text objects and sample them with the Eyedropper tool? No, Illustrator has a cool feature called Graphic Styles.

Let’s select our text and open the Graphic Styles panel. We can go to Window on the top menu bar and select Graphic Styles or hit the shortcut Shift + F5.

Inside Graphic Styles, all we need to do is click on the New Graphic Style button at the bottom of the panel. A new swatch previewing our customized style is added to the panel and we are set to go!

Ready for a quick test? Add a new text object to your artboard, have it selected with the Selection tool, move your mouse to the Graphic Styles panel and click on the swatch we’ve just saved.

Timeout #2

If you’re interested in learning more about graphic styles, check out this Adobe quick guide.

And There We Have It!

Amazing! I truly hope I’ve convinced all of you to start using the Appearance panel in your daily work! It’s an incredible design and productivity tool that will change your vector design game. It’s brilliant for basic and complex shapes and keeps your typography artwork editable. Once you start working with it, you’ll never give it up. Get inspired, explore all the potential, and share your talent with everyone!

What 's Next?

To go deeper with Illustrator, join BYOL and you will gain access to my Illustrator Essentials and Advanced courses as well as my 30+ additional courses on Figma, Photoshop,  Lightroom, Premiere Pro, Webflow, and more. As a BYOL member you will also enjoy personalized support, earn certificates, and tackle exciting community challenges. Get started here. 

See you in class! – Dan