Learn to add a sophisticated layer of depth to your designs with drop shadow effects in Adobe Illustrator. This article elucidates the process of selecting elements, applying the effect, and fine-tuning the settings to get the desired opacity, offset, and blur for the shadow.
Key Insights
- Applying drop shadow effects involves selecting the desired elements and accessing the 'stylize' and 'drop shadow' options under 'properties' and 'effects'.
- The characteristics of a drop shadow effect can be adjusted. 'Opacity' controls the transparency of the shadow, 'X-offset' and 'Y-offset' adjust the horizontal and vertical displacement, while 'blur' governs the sharpness of the shadow's edges.
- The drop shadow effect can be previewed while making adjustments and fine-tuned to match individual design needs, ensuring consistency across all elements in a design.
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In this video, we'll be adding a drop shadow to our elements. Let's start by selecting the elements we'll be adding a drop shadow to. To reference this, we can open up our PDF preview and we'll see that we have a drop shadow for our top banner, for our title "Job Fair, " for our details box, and for our sub banner.
So, let's go back in Illustrator, and we'll select each of these objects. We'll hit V on the keyboard for our selection tool, and from here, we'll be selecting our top banner and then, holding Shift, we'll select the rectangle, the title, and our bottom group with the banner and the small triangle. Next, we're ready to add a drop shadow.
To do this, we could go into Effect, Stylize, and Drop Shadow, or more quickly, we can simply go to Properties and Effects. We'll then choose Stylize, and Drop Shadow, and now let's go through the different options for our drop shadow. I always like to check Preview, so that I can see an example of what this will look like.
For our mode, we'll select Multiply. Our opacity adjusts how much opacity there is within the drop shadow. If we decrease this by double-clicking and typing 20, and adjusting the X Offset, we'll see it's much more transparent.
We'll go back to opacity and type 75, and then hit TAB on the keyboard to see the result. Next, for our X Offset, if we click up or down on the arrows, we'll see that it moves left and right. From here, we can adjust how much of an X offset we have.
Y Offset refers to the vertical offset on our Y-axis, and for both X and Y, we'll leave it at 0.1 inches. For our blur, we're currently at 0.07, which shows a slight blur. If we click up or down, we'll see that the shadow is more blurred out.
If we click up or down, we'll see there's virtually no blur. While this can give us a nice hard shadow, we want it to be a little bit more subtle, so let's click up, and this might be a little too subtle. So, for our blur, let's double-click and type 0.05, and then hit TAB to see the result. I like the look of this, as it's a little more specific; however, it's still a little dark in my opinion, so from here, let's adjust the opacity.
We'll double-click our opacity and type 50, and hit TAB, and we might need to make it a little darker. We'll double-click opacity again, and I'll type 65 and hit TAB, and I like the look of this. For your postcard, feel free to change the opacity, X and Y offset, as well as blur to fit your needs.
For me, I'll stick with this for my postcard. I'll then hit OK, and we've now added a drop shadow to each of these elements, making it consistent across each of these elements. We'll click outside to view our work, and let's now hit CTRL + S on the keyboard to save our work.
In the next video, we'll begin working on our woman character for the back of our postcard. See you there!