I am not sure how to frame this question so I will try to describe the problem.
Imagine I have two shapes. One is a hollowed out circle (like a doughnut chart). The second is a smaller filled in circle. The smaller filled in circle is then poitioned inside the hoolowed out one, so you have like a target but with no "middle" band. What I would like to do is apply a graphic style to the COMBINED shape. The problem is that if I select both shapes and apply the style, each shape will have its own style, whereas what I want is for the style to be distributed over the two shapes as if they were one. And if I use the shape builder tool, when I join the two shapes, from the outer hollowed out circle to the inner filled in circle, I fill in the shape for the "middle band" whereas I want that middle band to be empty.
You can probably tell I don't know Illustrator and come from Photoshop. In PS, I would simply select my two shapes and apply a style. Since my selection forms a shape that ignores the middle band, the style applies evenly to the whole selection. Can I do something similar in Ilustrator? In reality my network of shapes is more complex that the example above and I do need to keep it a vector.
Thank you for your suggestions.
Chris
