Subtitles of the Movie

I'm going to talk about stacking order here in this lesson, but keep in mind that I'm going to talk more about how to use advanced stacking techniques with layers later on. So what I'm going to do here is something I wouldn't normally do, I'd use layers instead. Having said that, I'm going to create two objects. I'm going to create a regular old ellipse, and I'll draw this out on my document. I'll also give this a color, and then I'm going to draw another shape, the old handy star, and I'm going to partially obscure the circle like so, and give the star a yellow fill. Now I'll move the star in front of the circle like this. Now of course, this looks like a design for a gas company that is no longer in business. But what if you want to bring the star behind the circle? How would you do that? Well as I said before, you could use layers, but we're not using layers here. What we can do instead is use the Object menu. So what I'm going to do is select the star, then I'm going to go to Object, Arrange, then I can choose one of these options here to decide how these objects will stack. What I would normally do is choose Send To Back, which literally puts it behind the other object. Think of it this way. When you make a hamburger, and those who are vegetarians out there, when you make a veggie burger, see I'm politically correct people, you always stack things in a certain order. You have the patty, you have the lettuce and tomato, you might put your condiments, and then you might put the bun. The stacking order is determined by your preferences, or what you're trying to design in this case in Illustrator. So what I could do is resize the circle, and then put it where I'd like to create a completely different design than the star in front of the circle. If I want to bring the circle behind the star, I could do one of two things. Since I can select the circle and the star equally, I can choose one of these and choose either to Send To Back, in this case I will do that because the circle is selected, or I could click on the star and then choose Object, Arrange, Bring To Front. Now you also notice that you have other options in here. We have Arrange, Bring To Front, Bring Forward, Send Backwards, and Send To Back. We can also Send To Current Layer. Now what these mean is that you can send objects not completely in back of something, but behind a stack of things. So I'm going to draw one more object here. I'll draw a rectangle right here, and I'll give this guy a color as well. Let's see here, blue. And let's say that I want to put the rectangle between the star and the green circle. So I'd go to Object, Arrange, Send Backward. Now this shape is not completely in the back. It's in between the star and the circle. So I sent it backwards a little tiny bit. Now you'll notice that because we can't see the circle at all. But if I go back to Object, Arrange, and then choose Send To Back, we can now see a part of the circle. So use these Object menus to send objects to the back, or just a little bit at a time to the front or the back, to create the stacking order that will help you with your designs.