5 Amazing Illustrator Plugins
Adobe Illustrator is a marvelous application to create vector art, graphics and illustrations. But that’s not all. You can extend the capabilities of Illustrator with the help of 5 illustrator plugins to achieve more.
Today we are going to explore 5 exciting illustrator plugins for graphic designers and illustrators.
5 Amazing Illustrator Plugins
These Illustrator plugins will help you save a lot of time and effort.
1. Phantasm
- By Astute Graphics
- Price: $73.85
If you’re a vector artist, I’m sure you may have sincerely wished to have some direct controls for color adjustments within illustrator. Astute graphics has answered your prayers and brings you color adjustment controls where you can have fine grain control over your colors, just like the ones found in Bitmap editing applications.
The Phantasm plugin brings you controls for brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, curves, levels and more color adjustment filters that otherwise ship with Photoshop.
This is one such plugin that you can’t live without once you use it. Check out the demo here, and I’m sure you would agree with me.
2. Artlandia Symmetry Works
- By Artlandia, Inc
- Price: $364.00
This illustrator plugin would be of great use to apparel and textile designers, though any designer interested in creating patterns and image tiles may find this indispensable. Symmetry works makes a tedious and calculated task of creating patterns a piece of cake.
With this amazing illustrator plugin you can also create tiled borders, rotational designs, harmonic growth designs and more. No matter how complex your pattern is or which direction you want the design to tile, Symmetry Works is sure to take care of such complexities for you.
You can use Symmetry works' amazing ‘Insertion Mode' where you can directly draw into a pattern and see the motif alter simultaneously in preview.
See the demo video here and download Symmetry works to create some awesome patterns for your next design project.
3. CAD Compo
- By BABY UNIVERSE
- Price: $150.00
CAD Compo is for Engineers, Architects and Interior designers who want to use 2D CAD tools within the Illustrator interface. The convenience offered by this Plugin for its price is really astounding.
CAD Compo is a combination of two very powerful plugins offered by baby-universe. The 2D drafting capabilities come from BPT-Pro3 plugin and the DXF export feature comes from EXDXF-Pro3 plugin.
This powerful plugin can be either used to create drawings or to enhance imported CAD drawings for additions, annotations and improve overall presentation of the design.
Moreover, these files can be exported as DXF that can be opened and edited in most CAD applications. So if you’re an engineer this plugin definitely will save you a lot of time and effort.
4. Studio Designer
- By Esko
- Price: $1,550.00
This Illustrator Plugin is specifically meant for 3D packaging design professionals. The beauty of this plugin is that it enables you to create artwork efficiently as you get to preview the 3 dimensional version simultaneously within a window.
Further you can export the result in a 3D pdf format that can be opened in a PDF reader to get an interactive 3D view. Isn’t that great? Now your client can see a virtual mockup before approving designs.
With Studio, errors such as misalignment, back-match and other packaging design mistakes can be eliminated before sending it for production.
If you’re looking for more, Studio Store Visualizer, another plugin by Esko helps you get a preview of your package design in a virtual environment. With this, you can see your product placed next to your competitors on a virtual shelf. What better way to make your client happy than this!
5. Select menu
- By Rick Johnson/Graffix
- Price: Free
Though the functionality offered by this plugin is fairly simple, this can come real handy while working on complex illustrations. This plugin will certainly save you loads of time when editing intricate artwork.
More often than not we need to select specific objects within an artwork. Though this may sound easy, it may turn out to be a hard slog when trying to select through a furry of different objects and groups. With ‘Select Menu' now you can specifically select between 9 different types of paths; open, closed, filled, unfilled, undashed, dashed and compound paths. Besides an array of different path types, you may also select grouped objects, live object groups, meshes, raster images and EPS files too.
This Illustrator plugin can save you tons of time and effort and is an ideal plugin for all kinds of designers.
Bonus Plugin – Magic Exporter
- By Jérémy Marchand / kodlian.com
- Price: 25,00 €
UI and web designers spend a tremendous amount of time to export their works. Magic Exporter simplifies the process and save your time.
How is it works? You mark the objects to export and when your document is ready, use the dedicated export menu. It’s as simple as that! Moreover, since it exports objects separately you no longer need to hide other objects that might be behind or over the object to export.
Devices nowadays require artworks with different pixel definitions, like iPhone or Android phones. Magic Exporter lets you export multiple images scaled for these platforms and fully define your own scaling options.
This plugin offers also customisation of files naming and trimming transparent pixel.
You can try it out here and use it right now on your projects.
I hope you find these Plugins beneficial. I would love to know if you did. Go on and try some of these awesome plugins now! Don't forget to subscribe to our newsletters! Enjoy your illustrator plugins!
Images © Ljupco Smokovski – Fotolia.com
Well Esko Studio :), lets look at Origami plugin from BoxShot3D 🙂 and forget about Esko
If Illustrator CS6>+ has pattern (repeats) capability built in, please explain the relevancy of Symmetry works.
Good question! The differences ware many, but the following are cruical:
* Illustrator makes patterns with just one symmetry (Simple shift); with SymmetryWorks you have all the seventeen possible symmetries.
* Illustrator paints all motifs exactly the same way, while SymmetryWorks automatically creates counterchange patterns (differently-colored, inverted, etc.). This is a new feature in SymmetryWorks 6: https://www.artlandia.com/products/SymmetryWorks/counterchange-patterns.html (click thumbnails to play the movies).
* When you save an Illustrator pattern, all its active components are expanded. So next time you want to edit a pattern created using brush strokes, symbols, blends, compound shapes, effects, nested patterns, and/or other components, you will see all these components expanded. Not so with SymmetryWorks, where you can always edit your active components live.
* With SymmetryWorks, one can take advantage of replicas, multi-replicas, and layouts that lets you create whole new classes of patterns with a click.
We actually get this question a lot. See here for details:
https://www.artlandia.com/products/SymmetryWorks/faq/#CS6_patterns