Illustrator CS3:
The appearance palette.

Lets take a closer look at the appearance palette and revisit the old “symbols” trick for those who missed it.

Update: Eureka! I was just shown something I should have figured out for myself: you can change the color of a symbol just by using the appearance palette (no need for the boolean trick I’ve recommended in the past!).

Download the demo file here.
Here’s a little tutorial I did over Easter (sorry for the late publish), just to show off the little-known appearance-palette’s multiple-fill capability. Seriously, play with this feature. It’s huge.

Draw three colored boxes and drag them into the swatches palette to create a pattern.

Now we have two fills, one on top of the other. So what, right? You can’t see the gradient anymore, because the pattern is hiding it! We’ll get there. First lets rotate the pattern.

Okay, now move the gradient above the pattern in the appearance palette. Think of the appearance palette as roughly analogous to the layers’ palette in Photoshop, except the layers aren’t pixel-based maps, they’re graphic fills. You can apply all the same transparency modes to each individual fill that you would to any other object.

So we put the gradient “layer” on Multiply mode, and voila! Shading on our pattern! And if you change the egg shape, both fills update accordingly.

Add one more gradient on Screen mode to create a little white specular highlight at the top, and you’re golden!

Here’s another way of doing shadows. Check out previous AI posts to see other methods.

And there we have it! Download the file or read this tutorial to see how I make the symbol color editable… it’s an invaluable trick!

Enjoy.