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Astute Graphics Plugins for Illustrator Review

Stuart Crawford

Welcome
We're about to embark on a journey into the heart of the Astute Graphics plugin bundle. Buckle up, and let's get our creative gears spinning!

Astute Graphics Plugins for Illustrator Review

Hey there, design enthusiasts! Today, we're venturing into the exciting realm of graphic design plugins. Specifically, we will deep-dive into a product that has been creating quite a buzz lately – the Astute Graphics plugin bundle. This bundle is not just another set of tools; it's a game-changer. It's like a magic wand that can take your Adobe Illustrator game from ‘just getting by' to ‘outstandingly creative' in no time.

Astute Graphics has been around for a while, and they've gained a significant reputation for crafting innovative, efficient plugins for Adobe Illustrator. These plugins are designed to enhance your productivity, speed up your workflow, and unlock new design possibilities in Illustrator that you never thought possible. From precision drawing to vector editing, these plugins provide a level of functionality that's hard to match.

You get a fantastic collection of 21 plugins in the Astute Graphics plugin bundle. Each has a unique offering, with tools that tackle everything from vector halftones, offsets, and measurements to colour adjustments, texturing, and even a live stipple effect. And the best part? They're incredibly intuitive to use.

This bundle is like a Swiss Army knife for graphic designers – it's packed with tools for almost every design task. Whether you're a seasoned professional looking to shave off precious minutes from your design process or a beginner trying to find your way around the intricacies of Illustrator, the Astute Graphics plugin bundle has got you covered.

Download Astute Graphics For Illustrator

Let's talk about some of the standout plugins in this bundle. One fan favourite is VectorScribe, a dynamic sketching and editing tool that allows you to manipulate vectors precisely and efficiently; that's truly impressive. Need to adjust paths, points, or handles effortlessly? VectorScribe has your back.

Then we have MirrorMe, a real-time symmetry tool that's a godsend for creating intricate, balanced designs. It's perfect for mandalas, icons, logos, and anything else that requires symmetrical precision.

And don't even get me started on Phantasm, a plugin that gives you Photoshop-level colour control within Illustrator. Do you want to adjust your vector workspace's brightness, contrast, curves, or hue/saturation? Phantasm makes it possible.

But the magic of the Astute Graphics bundle doesn't stop there. With plugins like ColliderScribe, offering a unique approach to arranging objects, and DynamicSketch, empowering you to draw more naturally and intuitively, you'll soon wonder how you ever worked without them.

In our review, we will delve into these plugins and more. We'll explore the unique features they offer, how they can speed up your workflow, and how they can unlock your creative potential in ways you might not have imagined.

We'll also look into the practical side of things like system requirements, pricing, and customer support and share tips and tricks on how to get the most out of each plugin.

So, stay tuned for some seriously insightful information, whether you're already a part of the Astute Graphics family or just now considering stepping up your design game with these plugins. We're about to embark on a fascinating journey into the heart of the Astute Graphics plugin bundle. Buckle up, and let's get our creative gears spinning!

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1 – FindReplace

Findreplace Find Panel

Have you ever spent hours sifting through a complex artwork to locate a specific object? It can be frustrating, right? But what if I told you there's a tool that can instantly identify and modify objects based on their visual attributes?

It's called FindReplace and is a game-changer when editing complex artwork. This tool allows you to select objects within an artwork and modify them natively easily. It's perfect for when you need to make repetitive changes or prepress adjustments.

But the best part? You can replace any artwork with whatever you want—no more spending hours manually replacing artwork. With FindReplace, it's just a few clicks away.

And if you're working with a lot of imported artwork or need to make extensive changes, you can create and save your searches. This makes it easy to access and modify the objects you need quickly.

2 – Phantasm

With Phantasm, you can access 12 different colour adjustments to help you achieve the perfect colour balance in your designs. Plus, all these adjustments are non-destructive live effects, so you can make changes without worrying about damaging your original artwork.

And when it comes to halftones, Phantasm has got you covered. It allows you to create vector halftones that are crisp and clean, no matter how much you zoom in or out. The halftones are fully editable so you can adjust the size and shape to your liking.

But that's not all. Phantasm is compatible with Photoshop settings, so you can seamlessly integrate it into your workflow. And if you're in the prepress stage, Phantasm has prepress corrections that can help you catch any issues before it's too late.

3 – Reform

The Reform Tool is a powerful and operational tool that allows you to sculpt or reshape any unlocked path quickly and easily. You can refine all changes to a path before applying or cancelling them, giving you complete control over the final result.

One of the best features of the Reform Tool is that it applies changes instantly while maintaining all other original path attributes, such as colour and transparency. This means you can change your paths without worrying about losing original qualities.

The resulting paths are also 100% standard, with no evidence that the Reform Tool was used. This ensures that your final designs look seamless and professional.

The Reform Tool works directly with all vector shapes, compound paths, clipping masks, text baselines, and more. Depending on your needs, it has three modes: sculpt mode, looped mode, and constant offset mode. The annotation preview also shows potential changes to the path, making it easy to see how your edits will affect the final design.

4 – VectorFirstAid

Vfa V2 Web Page Unoutline Text

One of the features of VectorFirstAid is the ability to convert outline text back to editable text. This can be useful if you need to change your text but can't because it's in an outline format. With VectorFirstAid, you can easily convert it back to editable text and make the necessary changes.

Another cool feature is the ability to change text-point alignment. This means you can adjust the positioning of your text so it looks exactly how you want it to. It's a small detail, but it can make a big difference in the overall appearance of your document.

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VectorFirstAid can also help you reduce the file size of your vector documents. This is particularly useful if you need to send the document to someone else or upload it to a website. VectorFirstAid can help you create a more streamlined and efficient file by eliminating redundant information.

Lastly, VectorFirstAid can help you recover resources from old files. If you have an old vector document that you need to access but don't have the original resources anymore, VectorFirstAid can help you extract them from the old file. This can save you a lot of time and hassle, as you won't need to recreate those resources from scratch.

5 – VectorScribe

One of the standout features of VectorScribe is its Dynamic Shapes Tool, which enables users to create and edit shapes with precision and speed. This tool allows for the creation of custom shapes and the ability to modify them quickly and easily. The Dynamic Corners Tool is another helpful feature, allowing users to adjust the corners of shapes to achieve the desired look and feel.

The Smart point removal brush is another essential tool in VectorScribe. It allows users to remove unwanted anchor points and simplify their designs with just a few clicks, saving time and effort. This tool is handy for cleaning up complex illustrations or designs.

VectorScribe also extends paths and reposition points, making it easy to fine-tune designs to perfection. This feature helps users adjust the shape of curves and lines, ensuring that designs are clean and precise.

Another unique feature of VectorScribe is its path editing capabilities, which allow users to create complex shapes and modify them using the “clockwork method”. This method involves breaking down complex shapes into simpler components and then reassembling them to create a final design.

6 – ColliderScribe

One of the most notable features of ColliderScribe is its advanced artwork selection tool. This tool allows users to select individual components of complex designs quickly and efficiently, enabling easy editing and customisation. This feature is convenient for intricate designs with multiple elements.

Another standout feature of ColliderScribe is its ability to align shapes with ease and precision. The Align Shapes tool allows users to align multiple shapes with a single click, ensuring they are all perfectly positioned relative to one another. This feature is convenient for creating symmetrical designs, such as logos or icons.

ColliderScribe also offers a Live Space Fill function that allows users to fill spaces between objects in real time. This feature is handy for creating intricate designs that require precise placement of elements, such as patterns or backgrounds.

7 – DynamicSketch

Gif Brushes Optimised

DynamicSketch is a powerful vector sketching tool that offers an intuitive drawing experience. Whether you are an illustrator, designer or just someone who loves to doodle, this tool provides a wide range of features that make your workflow smoother and more enjoyable.

One of the standout features of DynamicSketch is its Trim and Join tool. This feature works seamlessly on all paths, allowing you to quickly and easily trim or join multiple paths with precision and ease. This saves you time and helps you create cleaner and more accurate artwork.

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The natural and more accessible drawing toolbox for strokes and brushes is another feature that sets DynamicSketch apart. You can easily create various styles with various customisable brushes and strokes. The tool is ideal for stylus devices such as Wacom, Surface Pro, and macOS Sidecar, allowing you to enjoy a more natural and intuitive drawing experience.

DynamicSketch also offers personalised preference settings, allowing you to customise the tool to your preferences. Whether you prefer a dark or light interface or want to adjust the sensitivity of your stylus, you can tailor the tool to meet your specific needs.

8 – InkFlow

InkFlow is a unique drawing and lettering tool that allows you to create digital artwork that looks and feels like it was made with traditional ink and pen. With its advanced ink simulation controls, InkFlow enables you to produce various strokes and effects, just like you would with an actual pen.

One of the standout features of InkFlow is its ability to turn your stylus into a calligraphic tool. With its advanced controls, you can adjust the thickness and angle of your strokes, making it easy to create beautiful calligraphic lettering and illustrations. The tool is also highly responsive, providing a natural and intuitive drawing experience.

InkFlow is designed to be 100% editable in Illustrator, so you can easily import your artwork and continue working on it in a vector-based environment. This makes it easy to create professional-grade artwork that can be used in various settings, including print and digital media.

9 – InkScribe

InkScribe is a powerful vector design tool that takes precise path creation to the next level. It enhances the native Pen Tool of Adobe Illustrator, allowing designers to create paths with greater accuracy and ease.

One of the standout features of InkScribe is its ability to constrain distance preferences. With this tool, designers can set specific distance measurements between anchor points, ensuring that each path segment is the correct length. This feature saves time and reduces errors, making it ideal for intricate designs or technical illustrations.

Another advantage of InkScribe is its ability to drag paths into place without fiddling with handles. This feature makes it easier to create smooth curves and shapes, allowing designers to focus on the creative aspects of their work. By eliminating the need for constant adjustment, InkScribe streamlines the design process and enables designers to work more efficiently.

10 – SubScribe

When it comes to graphic design, accuracy is everything. Whether you're working on a logo, an illustration, or a web design, every line, shape, and gradient needs to be just right. Fortunately, tools are available to help you create accurate artwork and gradients in your designs.

Two tools that can help you achieve precision in your gradient designs are the Gradiator and Gradient Forge panels. These tools allow you to easily create custom gradients, choosing from various colour and opacity options to create the perfect effect for your design.

Another tool that can help you create accurate designs is the Arc by Points tool. This tool allows you to create curved lines by defining an arc's centre, start, and endpoints. This feature can help make complex shapes and patterns, such as those in logo designs.

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11 – Randomino

As a designer, it's easy to get stuck in a creative rut and find yourself producing similar designs repeatedly. But what if there was a tool that could help you shake things up and generate unique designs with just a few clicks? That's where the Randomini Tool, part of the Randomino plugin, comes in.

With the Randomini Tool, you can interactively randomise your artwork and achieve quick and easy randomisation in just a few clicks. No need for complicated scripts or manual adjustments – select the object you want to randomise and let the tool do the work for you.

The Randomini Tool allows you to randomise various design aspects, including scale, rotation, position, and hue/colour. This means you can quickly and easily create designs with different sizes, angles, positions, and colour schemes without manually making each adjustment. This can be especially useful when developing various designs for a particular project, such as a series of logos or icons.

12 – Stipplism

Stippling is a classic technique used by artists and designers for centuries to create textured and shaded illustrations. With the Stipplism plugin, designers can easily add a live stipple effect, bringing an old-school look to modern designs.

One of the critical features of Stipplism is the Symbol Stipple tool, which allows you to create stipple patterns that include scale, colour, and orientation. This feature gives you control over how the stipple effect looks in your design, allowing you to create various textures and styles.

Another advantage of Stipplism is its ability to add stipple effects to vectors and text. This means you can easily create stippled logos, icons, and other vector-based designs and add stippling to text for a unique look. This can be especially useful when you want to create a vintage or retro design style.

Stipplism also allows you to apply stippling to gradients, which can add depth and texture to your designs. With the live stipple effect, you can see how the stippling interacts with the gradient in real-time, allowing you to adjust until you achieve the desired result.

13 – Stylism

Creating live effects can be time-consuming and often frustrating for a designer. That's where Stylism comes in – a powerful plugin that makes live results easy and intuitive to create.

One of the standout features of Stylism is the AG Splatter live effect. This tool allows you to easily create realistic splatter effects, adding texture and depth to your designs. Whether you're working on a grungy poster or a bold logo design, the AG Splatter live effect can add a unique touch to your work.

Another practical live effect in Stylism is the AG Architect live effect. This tool lets you easily create intricate, three-dimensional designs, making it ideal for architectural drawings and product design. This tool will enable you to create various effects, from simple line drawings to complex geometric shapes.

Stylism also includes a Live Block Shadow Tool, which allows you to add realistic, three-dimensional shadows to your designs. This feature can be beneficial when you want to create a sense of depth and dimension in your designs, making them more visually appealing and engaging.

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14 – Texturino

Texturino is a powerful plugin for Adobe Illustrator that allows you to add high-quality textures and opacity masks to your vector artwork. Its easy-to-use interface, Texturino, makes it simple to import your own textures or choose from a library of repeating and non-repeating textures to create unique designs.

One of the standout features of Texturino is its ability to quickly and naturally brush an opacity mask onto your artwork. This means you can easily control the transparency of your textures and create subtle or bold effects with just a few brush strokes. The texture manager lets you easily organise your textures to find and use in your designs.

Whether you're a professional illustrator, graphic designer, or hobbyist, Texturino is a valuable tool that can take your vector artwork to the next level. With its refined texture and opacity brush capabilities, you can add depth, dimension, and visual interest to your designs and create stunning illustrations that stand out.

15 – WidthScribe

One of the main features of WidthScribe is the ability to apply variable width to your vector strokes. This means you can adjust the thickness of your lines at any point along the path, creating a more dynamic and expressive look. The Width Brush and Eraser tools allow you to easily adjust the width of your strokes by simply dragging your cursor over the path. The Width Gradient tool lets you create smooth and gradual changes in stroke width for a more natural and organic effect.

In addition to these tools, WidthScribe includes the Width Stamp and Selector. The Width Stamp lets you quickly apply a pre-designed width pattern to your strokes, while the Width Selector allows you to select and modify individual points on your path to achieve even more precise control over your stroke width.

Whether you're a professional illustrator or graphic designer, WidthScribe is essential for adding depth and personality to your artwork. Its variable stroke width effects provide unparalleled control and creativity, creating complex and visually stunning designs that stand out easily.

16 – InkQuest

InkQuest is a vital software tool widely used for prepress controls and checks in the printing industry. One of its critical features is the ability to swap channels or ink mapping. This feature is convenient when printing complex designs that require specific colour combinations. By swapping channels, InkQuest can ensure that the final print output matches the designer's expectations.

Another essential feature of InkQuest is its ability to create an ink coverage temperature map. This map displays the ink coverage across a printed page, showing high and low ink density areas. The temperature map is essential for printers to adjust their ink levels and ensure consistent print quality across large print runs.

InkQuest also offers advanced separation capabilities, enabling printers to separate colours into individual plates or channels. This feature allows for precise control over colour output, resulting in sharp and vibrant printouts. By separating colours, printers can also achieve more accurate colour matching, allowing them to reproduce the hues and shades required by design.

17 – Rasterino

Rasterino is a versatile software tool offering various image editing and cropping features for graphic designers and artists. One of its key features is interactive image cropping, which allows users to quickly and easily crop an image to their desired size and shape. With Rasterino, designers can adjust the crop boundaries by dragging the corners of the selection area or inputting precise dimensions in the numeric controls.

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Another essential feature of Rasterino is its ability to trim off blank image areas. This feature automatically detects and removes any white or transparent areas around an image, making it easier to work with and saving time in the design process. This feature is particularly useful when working with large or complex images that require cropping or resizing.

Rasterino offers a robust relinking tool that enables users to relink multiple embedded images simultaneously. This feature comes in handy when dealing with documents containing many pictures, some of which need to be updated. Instead of manually relinking each image, Rasterino allows designers to relink all of them with just a few clicks quickly.

In-line editing of embedded images is another vital feature of Rasterino. With this tool, designers can adjust an embedded image directly within the document, such as changing its size, colour, or contrast. This feature streamlines the design process, eliminating the need to open and edit images in separate applications.

Buy the Astute Graphics Plugin Bundle Today!

Get Astute Graphics Plugins For Illustrator

In conclusion, the suite of Astute Graphics plugins for Adobe Illustrator reimagines the boundaries of what's possible in graphic design. These tools augment Illustrator's creative potential and streamline the design process, reducing the time and effort required for intricate tasks. The sheer breadth of functionality is enough to cater to the most demanding graphic designers, with plugins offering precision drawing tools, dynamic shapes, enhanced colour control, and more.

Astute Graphics has ingeniously filled in the gaps of Adobe Illustrator, providing innovative solutions to common challenges. Whether you're a seasoned professional seeking to turbocharge your workflow, or a beginner aiming to escalate your skill set rapidly, these plugins are an investment that will undoubtedly pay dividends.

What sets Astute Graphics plugins apart is their intuitive nature and powerful capabilities. The learning curve is minimal, and once mastered, these tools become an extension of the designer's hand, translating ideas into visual realities with unprecedented ease and speed.

As the world of graphic design continues to evolve, professionals must stay ahead of the curve. With Astute Graphics plugins, designers keep pace with the industry and shape its future. It's not often that a product can revolutionise a process so thoroughly. Yet, these plugins manage to do just that, reshaping the graphic design landscape and setting a new benchmark for what is achievable.

In the realm of Adobe Illustrator, Astute Graphics plugins have elevated the game, transforming how we work and creating endless opportunities for innovation. The future of graphic design is here, and it's astutely brilliant.

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Written By
Stuart Crawford
Stuart Crawford is an award-winning creative director and brand strategist with over 15 years of experience building memorable and influential brands. As Creative Director at Inkbot Design, a leading branding agency, Stuart oversees all creative projects and ensures each client receives a customised brand strategy and visual identity.

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