Creating transitions with blends in Illustrator CS2

By definition, a blend is the result of two or more items that are combined. In Adobe® Illustrator®, a blend is a set of at least two objects that morph into each other. In an example where you are blending two objects, Illustrator generates new shapes that appear between the two objects, making it seem like one of the objects is turning into the other. The iterations that are created between the two main objects (also referred to as key objects) are called steps, and as you’ll learn shortly, Illustrator gives you control over how many steps make up each blend (Figure 1).

Figure 1: A blend in Illustrator is made up of key objects and blend steps. A straight line, called the spine, connects the key objects.

Although at first glance it may seem like creating blends is something reserved for highly specialized tasks, the reality is that you can use blends for many different reasons. In fact, back in the day, before gradients were introduced to Illustrator, blends were the only way you could create color gradations. Here’s a list of some other common uses for blends in Illustrator:

• Creating shading effects. You can use blends to create photorealistic shading effects. Because blends can be created using any vector shape, you can create customized gradations not only in color, but in shape as well (Figure 2). This gives using blends a distinct advantage over using gradients.

Figure 2: By blending two crescent shapes, you can get realistic shading in a way that is not possible with linear or radial gradients.

• Creating animations. When creating animations in Illustrator, you can use a blend to tween steps between objects, saving you from having to create the necessary keyframes yourself (Figure 3). Tweening is a term used in animation to define the steps that appear when showing movement or one object morphing into another.

Figure 3: By blending two symbols with different opacity levels, Illustrator creates the necessary steps to create an animation.

• Distributing objects. If you need to repeat art across an area or along the curve of a path, you can use a blend to evenly distribute a specific number of steps (Figure 4).

Figure 4: If you are creating a blend between identical stars, you can have it follow a specific path.

You can’t blend images or area text objects, but you can blend just about anything else—including symbols and groups. In fact, you can blend between objects that have different effect settings; Illustrator blends the settings of those effects as well. Blends are pretty powerful, but don’t worry, they are easy to work with.

Requirements

To follow along with this article, you will need the following software:

Adobe Illustrator CS2

• Try
• Buy

Prerequisite knowledge:

Basic knowledge of Illustrator CS2

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