One of Macromedia FreeHand 5.5's advantages over Adobe Illustrator 6.0 is that it offers an extentsive system of style sheets, while Illustrator forces you to apply attributes manually and modify objects individually. If you use Illustrator 6.0, you need envy FreeHand users no more: Alien Skin's Stylist plug-in picks up where Illustrator leaves off, letting you combine progressive sets of fill and stroke attributes without laborious cloning and tweaking. It's a heck of a productivity tool, and it's the first Illustrator plug-in to take advantage of version 6.0's new API.
Style Control
After you install Stylist in Illustrator's Plug-ins folder, the program manifests itself as a floating palette with its own labyrinth of options, menus, and preferences. You can define styles that govern fill and stroke characteristics and — for text — character- and paragraph-level formatting attributes. Stylist imposes its own methods for specifying attributes, many of which are more convenient than Illustrator's. If you're more comfortable with the old ways, you can establish settings in Illustrator's own Paint Style, Character, and Paragraph palettes, then transfer them to the Stylist palette.
No other program gives you such selective control over style sheets. Stylist lets you turn on the precise attributes you want a style to affect; for example, a style may govern the line weight of several objects while letting you assign a different color and dash pattern to each stroke. You can even assign multiple styles to an abject, with each style affecting different sets of attributes. If two styles conflict — say, one calls for a blue fill and the other calls for orange — the order in which they appear in the palette determines their precedence. To change the order, you simply drag the style names.
Stylist is first and foremost an organizational tool, so it makes sense that it lets you edit stylistically similar objects simultaneously. When you modify a style, all paths and text blocks finked to that style are updated. You can also select, lock, and hide all objects linked to a style. And if you have several paths with identical fills and strokes, you can double-click on a path with Illustrator's eyedropper tool, convert the attributes into a style inside the Stylist palette, instruct Stylist to select all paths that share those attributes, and attach the styde sheet. From then on, you can control the attributes globally.
Construction Workers
All the functions I've mentioned so far are highly practical, but the features most likely to seduce and inspire are Stylist's constructions. A construction is a script that clones a path a specified number of times and incrementally adjusts the clones' fills and strokes to create a gradual blend. For example, you can create a neon effect by repealing strokes with increasingly lighter colors and thinner line weights. Constructions also lend themselves to drop shadows and contour effects. While you can achieve effects like these without Stylist, you end up with tens or even hundreds of overlapping paths, making editing a nightmare. In addition to changing fill and stroke attributes, you can transform clones by moving, scaling, and rotating them incrementally... By giving you the freedom to adjust and modify a construction at will, Stylist encourages you to try out effects you wouldn't otherwise attempt.
Although a construction consists of multiple paths, it appears as a single path. That means you can manipulate points and control handles, or transform or filter the path and let Stylist worry about updating the clones. Unfortunately, Illustrator 6.0's new API doesn't account for such a high level of automation; every time you edit a path with a construction style applied to it, Stylist has to recalculate the clones. Rather than ignore this automatic operation, Illustrator appends it to the Undo list. So if you move a path and then think better of it, you have to undo both the automatic construction update and the move.
Although Stylist’s palette is fairly straightforward, creating constructions is roughly as difficult as basic scripting, and the skimpy documentation isn't particularly insightful. However, you can choose from 103 predefined styles and dissect them to see how they work. Be aware that complex constructs take a few seconds to redraw on screen, and Stylist occasionally neglects to update a construction. Long-time Illustrator users may be mystified that styles aren't shared between all open illustrations, but you can easily copy styles from one file and paste them into another.
The Last Word
Some artists will doubtless have problems grasping Stylist’s benefits, while others will find constructions too complicated to bother with. But if you're willing to spend a little time with the program, you’ll gain more control over your text and graphics and be better prepared to make last-minute changes to suit your clients' whims. Best of all, you'll be dreaming up layered path effects that are currently too convoluted to attempt in Illustrator.
McClelland, Deke. (October 1996). Stylist. Macworld. (pg. 64).
Alien Skin Software
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2014-04-14 / 
e4f4720a0f510fbda69020f2ab397f20301c705f / 
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alienskinstylist.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
