Before I completely lose you, this article is about Adobe Illustrator, effects and the effect of effects… or some such design know-how that you probably knew how already.

Besides, Tigersprout is lacking something. Something being me. And my ego.

Reader… ego.

Ego… reader.

Now the introductions are out of the way, I must confess I’ve been coerced (and yes – if I was cleverer, I would have used the word cajoled, but such is the life of a simpleton) into typing this by the Power that is He. Basically, the conversation went along the now-familiar lines of:

Illustrator… like gnawing your own arm off, but gotta admit it’s powerful… just a shame it doesn’t allow you to draw anything… slight oversight… how nice Adobe is now it has absolute control over every designer’s life…

The banter then touched on the matter of applying a warp effect to an object. (Create shape… Effect -> Warp -> ...). This is a great tool, but it does make you wonder why the end result keeps on displaying the original object’s bounding box. And when you click on the warped object, you see the outline of the original un-warped object.

Confused?

He was.

But as I am now a self-proclaimed Illustrator Guru*, I poured scorn on His complete luddite-ness and offered this explanation in the most patronising way possible…

You have to understand that with Illustrator, there is a marked difference in operation between Effects and Filters, even though many of the operations appear in both menus. Filters do what you would expect. For example, if you roughen an edge of a vector object (Filter -> Distort -> Roughen…) using the Filter tool, you are able to select and edit all newly created vector nodes as you would expect. However, if you roughen a vector object using the Effect tool (Effect -> Distort & Transform -> Roughen…), you get the same confusion as with the Warp Effect – the bounding box remains unchanged.

The reason for this is that Filters change the original object, whereas Effects applies a style “on the fly”. The latter bases the result on the original object and is therefore non-destructive (hence the reason the object bounding box doesn’t change). You are able to edit the vector paths of an object with an Effect applied to it and the Effect will automatically update to show these changes.

If working on an Apple, you can best see and edit the original vector object which has an Effect applied to it by toggling into wire-view mode (Apple-Y).

If you want to make an Effect editable, select the object and select Object -> Expand Appearance. In many situations (perhaps not all, depending on the Effect and original object), you will end up with a completely editable shape as it appears on-screen. Neat!

Now go and do some work…

Baron von Nick

*Also a self-proclaimed Kate Bush fan, but we don’t talk about that

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