Phantasm CS Styles

The page provides a diverse collection of Adobe Illustrator Styles made available exclusively to Phantasm CS range customers. The Styles are standard Adobe Illustrator type, but making use of the color-control live Effect tools found in the Phantasm CS range of plugins.

Styles provide an easy way to apply a pre-defined simple or complex effect to a selection of objects. The Phantasm CS range of plugins takes full advantage of their flexibility allowing for additional essential live color adjustments and graphic effects (such as Duotones and Halftones) to be applied. Many of the Styles shown here are multi-layered, defined with the use of Illustrator's Appearance palette/panel. Each can therefore be examined and modified by the user to make their own variation or simply take inspiration.

Please note that some of these Styles apply a number of complex live Effects and may therefore be time-consuming and processor/memory intensive to apply depending on the selected artwork.

About the examples shown

Styles can be applied to all objects, but some will work better with certain object types than others. This is especially true with the differences between vector artwork and rasterized images; the latter not normally defined with fill colors or outline strokes. Therefore the majority of the examples shown below are based on the same artwork containing a vector graphic design (grouped) and an embedded photo. As may be seen, the photo isn't always affected in the same way as the vector artwork.

Several Styles - epsecially the "Starburst" - thrives on specific objects, in this case text lines or simple paths. These Styles are demonstrated with more appropriate example artwork.

Note that all Styles were developed for CMYK documents with Document Raster Effects Settings set to 300dpi. Typically, the Styles can be used in RGB documents and/or at differing Effect resolutions, but may require further experimentation to perfect a desired look.

Don't forget to click on the sample images to view larger scale versions!

Learning more about Adobe Illustrator Styles

Creating Illustrator Styles can bring great advantages when it comes to improving workflows by making a common graphic "look" instantly available.

If you wish to learn more about how to create Styles, especially making use of the associated Appearance palette/panel, one recommended method would be to analyse how the Phantasm CS range Styles, above, have been constructed. But to help you further, a list of free on-line Styles tutorials and help pages are listed below:

• Adobe Illustrator user manual "Graphic styles" (CS4)
• Layers Magazine video tutorial "Graphic Styles in Adobe Illustrator"
• The Graphic Mac "Easily edit existing Graphic Styles in Adobe Illustrator"
• Deke McClelland/Adobe resource "Using Appearance and Graphic Styles" (CS4)
• Aquent Graphics Institute "Excerpt from Dynamic Learning - Illustrator CS3"
• About.com "Using Graphic Styles in Illustrator" Part 1
• About.com "Using Graphic Styles in Illustrator" Part 2
• GraphicFetish "Illustrator Basics: Getting To Know The Appearance Panel"