How to Create a Custom Styles Library for Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator's style libraries provide quick shortcuts to stylizing graphic objects. With one mouse click you can make an element look like a web button, a neon light or a tissue paper collage. As you experiment with your own special effects, you might want to save those effects for future use. You can create customized libraries to use with any document.

Instructions

1. Begin building your library with an empty styles palette. Open a new document, or one that contains elements with the styles you want to save.

2. Open the Illustrator's Styles palette. Choose "Select All Unused" from the options menu. All the default styles will assume highlights. Make sure you haven't applied any of Illustrator's default styles to objects in the document, or those won't be included.

3. Choose "Delete Graphic Style" from the Palette options menu or click on the trash icon. When the dialog box asks for confirmation click "OK." Your palette should empty.

4. Apply any combination of fills, strokes, effects, blend modes or transparencies to a path. When you're satisfied with the effect, drag the path onto the Styles palette. A dialog will ask you to name your style. Add as many styles as you want.

5. Choose "Save Brush Library" from the Brushes palette options menu. The dialog box will prompt you to save the file in Photoshop's default brushes folder.

Tips & Warnings

• As your collection grows larger, create different style libraries to organize the types of styles you create.