How to use effects in Illustrator? How many effects does Illustrator have? What are the most interesting and useful Illustrator effects?
Illustrator is a powerful software for the professional design of vector graphics. Illustrator has a wide range of applications – including designing logos, emojis, icons, brochures, infographics, book and magazine pages, etc. There are many reasons for the popularity, practicality, and power of Illustrator. One of them is that the designer can give many, varied and interesting effects to his graphics with this software. But are all the effects in Illustrator equally important and useful? No!
Naturally, the designer or you and I who want to work with Illustrator are not going to use effects in every design. Because effects have different types and uses. Based on the design that the designer makes with Illustrator, he may get help from the effect to make it more attractive. To make it easier to choose the right effect, it is not necessary to learn all the effects in detail. It is enough to learn the most useful effects. In this article, I am going to introduce you to the most interesting and useful effects in Illustrator.
Table of Contents
Effects in Illustrator
Effects are used either to make graphics more attractive and impressive or to add meaning to them. As mentioned, there are different types of effects. Some effects are very heavy and the change they create in the design is very noticeable, while others are lighter and some effects are specific to letters and words.
Effects in Illustrator and the effects menu are divided into two general types:
- Illustrator effects for vector designs and
- Photoshop effects for raster designs.
Among all the effects, some are more widely used and famous than others, that is, the designer can use them in most designs. Next, how to use 3 commonly used Photoshop effects and 3 commonly used Illustrator effects will be taught. Before dealing with the effects, I should say that there are two main ways to access the effects in Illustrator:
- Effects menu (as you can see in the image above) and
- Properties Panel.
To edit any effect, when you select it, the properties box for that effect will open from where you can edit the effect. Just make sure that you have to select any image or design to apply the effect. If you have several vector designs and you want to apply the effect to all of them, you must first put them in a set (group) so that the changes will affect all of them.
Teaching the most useful Photoshop effects in Illustrator
1. Types of Blurs in Illustrator
The Blur effect allows the designer to blur objects, letters, and photos as much as they want. There are 3 choices for this effect (Gaussian Blur, Radial Blur & Smart Blur). The designer can easily adjust and control the blur amount of the photo or image as well as its quality. Gaussian Blur has been applied to the first image and Radial to the second image. The last image is related to Smart blur. In this type of blur, the designer has 3 choices: Normal, Edge Only & Overly Edge. In the last image, you see a photo that has been blurred with the Overly Edge effect. The blur effect is widely used in the design of wallpapers in Illustrator.
2. Glowing Edges effect
An effect that allows the designer to have shiny photos in a few seconds. Choose the Stylize effect from the Photoshop effects menu. Stylize has only one option and that is Glowing Edges. When you select it, its special box will open and you can change the effect settings as you want, for example, make it brighter.
3. Texture effect
In this effect, the designer can give 6 different textures to photos. Whatever texture you choose, it is possible to set its properties in its box.
Teaching the most useful Illustrator effects
1. Rasterize effect
It can be said that this is one of the best and most useful Illustrator effects. Imagine you spent a lot of time and energy creating a design with Illustrator. But for various reasons, you want this design not to be vector. You want to convert it to a pixel or raster version. Illustrator has thought about this and allowed its user to convert his design to any format other than vector. For this format change, after completing the design, select Rasterize from the Illustrator effects menu. Then a box will open for you where you can adjust all the details of the format change.
2. Distort & Transform
Imagine you want to design different geometric shapes. Bugs you don’t even know the names of. With the Distort & Transformation effect, you can make any shape you want from a rectangle or square! This effect allows you to transform basic designs and shapes into 7 other shapes. The first choice in this effect is Free Distort.
3. Wrap effect
This effect is not only useful for designers. It is practical, interesting, and exciting for you and me who want to kill goldfish. The Wrap effect gives you 15 options to transform basic shapes into other shapes such as flags, waves, arches, shells, and more.