Blend modes and opacity masks in Vectornation by Zaweba

Layered artwork comes alive when its layers interact. A shadow that darkens what's under it, a glow that brightens, a texture that fades out towards one edge. In Vectornation by Zaweba the Transparency panel controls all of that, with 16 blend modes, opacity masks, knockout and isolation.

Blend modes

A blend mode decides how an object's colours combine with the colours beneath it. The ordinary setting simply covers what's below. Darkening modes behave as if you had laid coloured glass over the artwork, which is ideal for shadows and for tinting a drawing without hiding the lines. Lightening modes do the opposite and suit highlights and glows. Contrast modes deepen the darks and brighten the lights together, and another family works with hue, saturation, colour or brightness separately.

Sixteen modes gives you a broad set, which helps artwork brought in from other design programs keep its look. You don't need them all. A darkening mode, a lightening mode and a contrast mode do most of the work in most illustrations, and the rest are worth trying when you want a particular effect.

Opacity masks

An opacity mask uses the light and dark of one piece of artwork to control how see-through another is. White parts of the mask show the object, black parts hide it, and greys partly show it. A gradient used as a mask makes an object fade smoothly away, the classic way to make a reflection fade out below a product, or to soften the edge of a photograph into a background. Because the mask is itself vector artwork, you can edit it at any time.

Knockout and isolation

These two controls deal with groups. Isolation keeps the blend modes inside a group from affecting anything outside it. Without it, a group of darkening shapes darkens the background as well as each other. With it, they blend only among themselves. Knockout stops objects inside a group from showing through each other, so overlapping see-through shapes in the group behave as one surface over what lies below, rather than building up darker where they overlap.

They sound technical, but they solve everyday problems, such as a half-transparent badge made of several shapes that shows unwanted darker patches where its parts overlap. Turning on knockout fixes it in one click.

Opacity in two places

Object opacity in the Transparency panel fades the whole object, fill, stroke and effects together. Vectornation also lets each colour have its own opacity, set in the colour boxes. Use the panel when the whole object should fade, and colour opacity when only the fill or only the stroke should.

Print and screen

Blend modes and transparency look the same on any screen, but print needs more care. Before sending work with transparency to a printer, look at the separations preview and the overprint preview, use colour proofing with the printer's profile, and export as PDF/X-4, which is designed to carry transparency properly. Ask the printer if you are unsure. For screen work, check the result over the real background it will be shown on.

Used with a light hand, the Transparency panel turns flat stacks of shapes into artwork with light, shadow and depth, while every part stays editable.