Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to explain
how to use Expand and Expand Appearance in Adobe Illustrator. All right,
let's get started. All right, I'm here in Adobe Illustrator, and I'm just going to Create new.
We'll come up here to the top and choose Print and then Letter, and we'll Create. OK, I'm going
to quickly explain the difference between these and why you might want to use these. And then
I'll show you how I got to that point. So we'll actually be building the graphics that I'm going
to paste in right now. OK, so I've got a star with a stroke around the edge. It's just very simple.
And then I've also got this 'EXPAND' word with a lot of different fills and strokes and effects
that have been applied, and that is a different situation. So if we hit CMD Y, or CTRL Y on a PC,
right now, you can see the difference. If you watch the star, it's just the shape,
but if you look at the 'expand', it just becomes simple text. If I click on the star, and then go
to Object>Expand, and we go ahead and do the fill and the stroke and say OK, it will separate the
fill and the stroke, and it'll expand the stroke to not be a stroke anymore. It'll be a fill,
as you can see. Now, if I use my Group Selection Tool to drag this away, it's now a separate piece
from that star. A minute ago, they were connected, and you couldn't separate them without going to
Object>Expand, of course. And our outline is now a shape. All right, let's look at 'expand.'
And I'm going to drag out my Appearance, so you can see what's going on. I have a warp on
this. That is this arc, and it's what's making it look like that. I have two fills and two strokes,
and they've both been transformed. So when I go up to Object and choose Expand, it's
not available. Expand only works with one stroke that you're wanting to expand to a shape. Expand
Appearance is when you have an appearance with all of these different things. So let's go ahead and
choose that. Now these are all grouped, so I'm going to ungroup them with SHIFT CMD G or SHIFT
CTRL G. And, now you can see we've got that fill, we've got that outline, we've got another fill,
and this outline. And it's changed all of our effects to be expanded. And now they're shapes,
too. So if we hit CMD Y, it's no longer a straight line of text. It actually follows
the shape that you saw before. Let's hit CMD Y or CTRL Y to get back. Now let me undo all this.
Now I've still expanded Appearance on this, but let's come up to Object now >and Expand.
And this will take all the strokes and turn them to fills. So we'll do that. And we'll say OK,
and now you can see everything is a shape. We do not have any strokes over here.
So what we could do now is come to Pathfinder and just merge these. And then we can make some
extra changes that we wouldn't be able to do if it were not expanded. So I'm going to hit P
and minus and just delete these little points right here. Get rid of these.
So we get an actual drop shadow that looks a little nicer. And I'll come
in here with my Group Selection Tool, and delete these pieces, and these down here.
So both Expand and Expand Appearance will allow us to edit parts of the design that we couldn't get
to before, which is good, but, we cannot turn them back into what they were before. So it's good to
save a copy of the unexpanded version off to the side of the artboard. So I just pasted these in
to show you what I mean by that. So before doing this, you'll want to make a copy off to the side
that is unexpanded. I'm hitting CMD Y and CTRL Y to show you the difference. So now I'm going
to go into how to actually create this version of the graphic so that you could get to this point.
And same with up here. This one's really simple though. OK, so I'm going to Select All and Delete.
All right, now the first thing I'm going to do is get my star shape. So I'll hit M on my keyboard,
and that will bring me to my shapes. And then I can get down under here and get my Star Tool.
I'll click and drag, and I'm going to hold SHIFT and OPT or SHIFT and ALT on a PC. So we now have
a star. I'll hit D on my keyboard to get a white fill and a black outline. Let's change the fill
to green so we can see it. So I used my Color Palette to do that, and if you don't have that up,
all of these palettes are available under Windows, so we can just go to Window and >Color, which is
right here. OK, and let's increase the thickness of this stroke. I'm going to put it at about 40.
And that way, you can really see what's going on with it. You can see that half of the stroke
comes inside the blue line, which is what we drew, and then half comes outside. So if we reduce this,
that's also the same - half will be inside and half will be outside. OK, so let's open up the
Stroke Palette. And we can do a lot of different options here. We can round our corners here,
we can align the stroke to the inside, although it gives us kind of a weird little shape in here.
I usually leave this to the center, and then we can also align it to the outside.
I'm going to go ahead and leave it centered for now. And I want to actually
move the stroke away from this shape, and have it be its own shape, kind of.
So if we open our Layers Palette by hitting F7, or going to Window>Layers, and then clicking on this
little caret, you can see we just have a path here. But if we come up here to Object>Expand,
and we'll do the fill and stroke and say OK, you can see now that it's added a group to this. We've
got a piece that has just the outline. And we've got another piece that has just the green star.
So I'm going to get on my Group Selection Tool, which is underneath your Direct Selection Tool,
and I'm just going to click this and move it. You can see that this is now a shape. It's not
a stroke anymore. It looked like a stroke, but it's been expanded to a shape in and of itself.
And we can move this one around separately, too. The thing is, we don't have the option of changing
this stroke anymore to be thicker or thinner or anything like that. So it's a really good idea
to first make a copy off to the side. So let's undo and get back to this where we only have a
path here. Instead of doing it that way, you'll first want to hold ALT or OPT and just click and
drag and pull a copy off to the side. And then you can go ahead and expand with CMD E or CTRL E.
That's the same as going to Object>Expand. And then we'll get this dialog box. And we'll say OK,
and now we can move these apart and do whatever we want with them. Now they're still grouped,
so they'll move together unless you're using the Direct Selection or the Group Selection. So to
ungroup them, we'll just hit SHIFT CMD G or SHIFT CTRL G on a PC. And now they'll move separately.
So that's one use for Expand. If you want a shape instead of a stroke, maybe you're making a cut
file for a cutting machine, and you want your outline to show up as an outline there, you'll
need to expand it first. And we still have this one over here in case we want to reduce the size
and make changes later. I want to pull this off to the side of the screen. OK, now let's talk about
Expand Appearance. Let's make some text. I'll hit T on my keyboard and click once. And then I'm just
going to type out EXPAND in all caps. I'll get on my Selection Tool, grab a corner and hold
SHIFT and make it quite a lot bigger. And then we'll come up here to the Character and choose
Montserrat. And I'll just choose Extra Bolt. And now I want to get my Appearance Palette open,
and I'm going to add some effects on this. Now when you add effects to text, it's always a good
idea to open up your Characters Palette, and get rid of your fill. And then come up to your type
and add a new fill up there. It's just a good idea to do this because there are things you
cannot do with text if you leave the fill in the Characters Palette, like adding a gradient
that actually shows up. It's just a good practice to get in the habit of doing that. Let's change
our fill to kind of a yellowish green. I'm going to click on my stroke in the Appearance Palette
and add a black stroke to this, and I want to make it quite a lot bigger.
And you'll notice it starts closing in like this. Let's reduce it a little bit,
but because it lies exactly halfway on the fill and then halfway off the edge,
it covers up some of our fill, and we don't want that. So I'm going to move the stroke below the
fill... grabbing in the empty area over here and pulling it down below the fill like this.
Now we can see the whole fill and only half of the 10-point outline. So we could increase this if we
wanted to a little bit. I think 10 points is fine. We'll want to click in here with our Text Tool
and just OPT left arrow to bring that over. That's ALT and left arrow on a PC. We'll do the same over
here. So that all the letters are touching. OK, now let's come up to Effect and choose >Warp
and >Arc. Now I like my text to be right about 23% on the bend. It's not too much, but it's obvious
that it's being arced. So we'll say OK. And I want to show you what happens with your text
if we look at it in Preview Mode. So hit CMD Y or CTRL Y. It's just regular text. It's not arced,
like we see in the regular mode. Hit CMD Y or CTRL Y to get back. OK,
now I want to have kind of a drop shadow looking thing on here. So I'm going to copy both my fill
and stroke. I'll click over here in the blank area and drag them onto the plus symbol. So now we have
a green fill exactly behind this green fill and a black stroke exactly behind that one.
Let's go ahead and change that fill to black. So I'm going to click this
and just drag it onto the fill. Then I'll click on my stroke, and I'll come up here
to Effect>Distort & Transform and >Transform. I'm going to scale it horizontally by about 95%.
We'll leave this one at 100. And then I also want a vertical move just to move it down 10 pixels.
And we'll preview that. OK, and that looks about like what I want. So we'll say OK. Now if we
click this little drop down caret, you can see the transform that I just added right here. I want to
take this transform and apply it to the lower fill also, so we don't have these white areas. So I'm
just going to click on this and make a copy. And then I'll just pull this up underneath this fill.
So that got rid of them and gave us a more kind of normal look to this. OK, now you'll
notice we have four different pieces. We've got a fill on top, we've got a stroke under that,
then we've got a transform fill, and a transformed stroke. And if you hit CMD Y or CTRL Y, you'll
see that this is just live text. You can type anything you want in here, and it'll be just fine.
That's the nice thing about using Appearance. You can have everything applied to just one
shape or one text path. I'm going to undo. There are a few more things I'd like to do to this. One
is like get rid of this little white area here and here and here. I want to end up with one black
shape, and then a green shape on top of it. So to do that, I'll need to expand the Appearance.
And I'll show you what happens when we do it. First, I'm going to make a copy off to the
side because we'll lose our text path. And we'll eventually lose all the strokes and everything,
and everything will become a fill. So I'm going to hold ALT or OPT and drag a copy off to the side.
Then I'll click on this one, and we'll come up here to Object, and now we can >Expand
Appearance. Expand is no longer available. So I'm going to click this. Now we can use our
Group Selection Tool to click on these pieces and see what we have. We've got a green group here.
We've got an outline shape here, that is still an outline, it's not expanded all the way to a fill.
We've got this other black shape that we've made underneath it,
then we've got that other outline that was underneath. So all four pieces are separated now.
And if we hit CMD Y now you can see them here. Let's hit CMD Y to get back. And I'm
going to undo back to where we were. I want to be able to kind of join these pieces here.
And we're not really to that point yet. So we'll need to expand again to get all of the strokes
to be fills. So let's go to Object>Expand. And we'll do both the fill and the stroke.
And now you can see that everything is expanded out. We don't have any strokes anymore,
and everything is a fill. So at this point, what I'm going to do, I'll get rid of my Appearance.
I'll come down here to the Pathfinder and then choose Divide. This is going to divide all those
pieces into tiny separate pieces like this, which might seem a little counterintuitive,
but let's undo that and get it back to where it was. And now I'm going to make the green
one piece. So I'll hit Y on my keyboard, which will give me the Magic Wand Tool. And I'll click,
and that gives me all the green stuff. I'll go to my Pathfinder and unite that.
And now I'm going to hide it to move it out of the way. That's CMD 3, or CTRL 3 on a PC. Now we
have all this black. I'm going to hit Y again and select all the black pieces. And we'll come down
to the Pathfinder and unite those into one piece. I'm going to hide those with CMD 3 or CTRL 3,
then I'm going to hit CMD Y or CTRL Y to make sure there's nothing else that I don't want in here. So
let's do that. I do see we have some shapes. I'll use my A Tool that is my Direct Selection Tool,
to highlight these. Now, if you use your V Tool, these are grouped with the things you hid. If you
use this tool, it'll delete everything, not just these pieces. So be sure to use your A
tool or your Group Selection underneath. We'll delete those. Now I'll hit CMD Y or CTRL Y to
get back. I'll show all with OPT CMD 3, or ALT CTRL 3 on a PC. So now we have two shapes. So
we've got the green and we've got the black. Now we can make this look a little bit better.
I'm going to zoom in here. I'll hit P and then the minus to get to this tool, which is Delete Anchor
Point. And I'm going to come in here and just delete some of these anchor points I don't want.
And here are a couple pieces that I don't think look very nice, so I'll just delete those, too.
So that is one way to use the Expand Tool. It's to get something like this to look more like this.
And also to really simplify it. There are a couple other reasons that you might want to use the
Expand and Expand Appearance. This is a simpler form. It doesn't have any effects or anything like
that on it right now. So if someone's using an old version of Illustrator that doesn't support these
effects, you can give them this type of graphic. They'll be able to use it on their machine. Same
with other alternate versions to Adobe products, like Affinity or Corel. This way is kind of
a...what you see is what you get. Whereas this way, it's actually a little confusing. If you hit
CMD Y, your text doesn't really look like this. If you happen to upload stock vectors to sites
like Shutterstock, or Adobe Stock, you cannot have effects in them, and they all have to be
expanded before you submit. That's another reason that Expand and Expand Appearance are important.
It's kind of hard to explain when you need to use them, but I hope you understand it a little better
now. All right, if you like the way I teach, I also have a few classes out on Skillshare, and I
have a link in my description for two free weeks for new members. And if you use that you'll be
able to take all my classes for free. All right, I'll see you in the next video. Thank you!!!