At the bottom of Illustrator’s toolbox, you see the fill and stroke color indicators, with a series of icons beneath, as shown here.
•
The way the drawing is set up at this particular moment, there is no stroke – or at least, it has no color (by the way, you can’t apply a gradient to a stroke legally… I’ll show you the back door on how to handle it, though – it’s cool). The top box is the Fill box, and it shows a black and white linear gradient. That’s the default blend, white on the left, black on the right. The three boxes below are, from left to right, the solid fill Color, the Gradient fill selector, and the None (or no color) selector. If you have an object selected and you click the Color box, you’ll set the palettes up to show solid colors, and whatever color has been chosen last will become the fill color of your object. Click the Gradient box, and whatever gradient was selected last (or the default) will fill your object. That gradient will be a straight gradient from left to right; the angle of past gradients isn’t carried over. Obviously, the None box removes all fills from the object.

Okay, so let’s say you have a small rectangle on your page. We’ll give it a basic gradient fill by just clicking the Gradient selector at the bottom of the toolbar. Depending on what you’ve got going on your computer, you’ll end up with some kind of gradient. So far, so good! Now, select the Gradient Tool from the toolbar and make sure that the Gradient palette comes up by double-clicking the tool. More than likely it’ll be white on the left and black on the right. Boring, right? To introduce color into the gradient, click on one of the boxes with the house-roof shape pointers on top that are directly beneath the gradient ramp. We call it a ramp. Down here in Tennessee, they even have a ramp festival… but that’s for an onion-like plant.

You can also select gradient swatches from the Swatches palette, and create your own to save there for use later.

Anyway, you’ll have the rectangle with a white-to-black gradient. For color, there are several methods to try. First, try double-clicking one of those little house-shape boxes. Bingo! Your color swatches palette pops up. Select a color, and the color appears in that part of the gradient. You can also drag a color onto the house-shaped squares from the color swatches palette if it’s already open. FIRST, though, you have to select that box. It’s called a Gradient Slider, in case you’re interested. I guess that’s better than house-shaped square, huh? Another way to introduce color is to click and drag a color from your swatches or the color palette directly onto the ramp. Using the color palette itself allows you to create your own color from the CMYK, RGB, or other sliders. Here, I’ve added a third color to the gradient. I also had inadvertently changed the transparency of the colors before adding them to the ramp - that explains the pastel look. The actual colors are in the ramp itself.

So, you’ve got a linear gradient down pretty good. What about the radial gradients? Too easy. Just select Radial from the Type menu in the Gradient palette. Now you have a bulls eye effect. The anchor color is on the left of the ramp, and is the center of your gradient. It runs a full 360° and the colors are applied in the same fashion as with the linear grads.

You’ll notice that the Gradient palette has a couple boxes, too. One is the angle of the grad. Just type in an angle, or use the slider. That will adjust the direction of a linear grad, but doesn’t do squat for a radial (hey, it’s a circle, what can I tell ya?). The other box adjusts the Aspect Ratio of a radial blend. It has no use in a linear grad, but with the radials, you can squish or stretch the height of the ellipse that the radial gradient takes. That’s a pretty useful tool!

Regardless of the type of gradient you’re creating, there’s another very important adjustment that you can make on the ramp: the “other” Gradient Slider – that’s the diamond shapes on top of the ramp. They determine the mid-point between two adjacent colors. By using them, you can create an abrupt color change as shown here.

But, we’re still not through with all the stuff this toolset can do! We haven’t even used it, as a matter of fact. So now, select the rectangle with a linear gradient in it, and select the Selection tool (solid arrow pointer). Notice that the rectangle is selected, and you can click and drag and adjust colors like they’re going on sale. Select the Gradient Tool, and you’ll see a weird bar with a circle on one end and a square on the other. It’s just sitting there, isn’t it? Well, the circle is the “base” point of the gradient – where it starts. The square shows where it ends. If you click and drag the circle, you can adjust the colors that appear in the rectangle – the colors go beyond the end points of the gradient bar! If you hover the mouse over the bar, it expands to show more color, and all the Gradient Sliders show up. Cool, huh? You can move the sliders directly on the art instead of in the palette! The square box holds more secrets, though. Click and hold it and move it toward or away from the circle on the other end. You stretch or shrink the length of the grad. Notice that when the square is selected, the cursor changes to have a small square in the top-left corner of a slightly larger dotted square (they sure can complicate things at Adobe). Move the cursor off the square, and you’ll eventually see a rotate icon cursor. Click and drag to change the angle of the gradient. Pretty neat stuff.

It’s about the same for a radial grad, you can change the location of the center point by moving the circle; you can change the length of the gradient; you can adjust colors on the expanded ramp; and last, if you’ve changed the aspect ratio of the grad, you can change the angle of it. This tool just keeps on getting neater all the time.

In these last two examples, I’ve held down the Option/Alt key and dragged the Gradient Sliders along the ramp to create this neon yellow bulls eye effect. Then I used the Scale tool to squeeze the height, and the Shear tool to shift the rectangle into a parallelogram shape. I did this to show you that the circular shape has been modified as well.

The last bit of information that you can control in the Gradient palette is the Opacity and Location. The Opacity field allows you to lower the opacity (or increase the transparency if the glass is half-full) of individual colors in the ramp. Location is sort of tough to explain, but simply, if you click really close to the middle of the ramp, the number in the Location field should read somewhere close to 50%. Move to the left and the number gets smaller; to the right it gets higher. This is useful if you want something repeatable in your design.

Take note, that this wasn’t the Gradient Mesh tool. That’s a whole ‘nother can of worms!