Real Life Case Study: Horst Signs

The tools that Astute Graphics provide are an absolute game changer for Illustrator.

About Horst Signs

Horst Signs is a custom signage and vehicle graphics provider that pairs technology with craftsmanship, working closely with clients to produce work that helps them stand out. The business grew out of “Horst’s Hand Painting”, started in 1982 by founder Howard Horst with paint, brushes and an artistic streak.

From hand-painted signs and billboards the company moved into plotted vinyl and thermal printing, and within the last seven to ten years shifted its design work into Adobe Illustrator — having previously worked across Gerber Scientific’s Omega Composer, Photoshop and Flexisign. Today it runs two locations, with second-generation family members involved in leading the business forward.

Workflow before and after Astute Graphics

AG Block Shadow

Creating block shadows used to mean importing artwork into Gerber’s Omega Composer, exporting an AI file and coming back into Illustrator. That round-trip was a big enough drag to push the team to find a better way. AG Block Shadow does it natively — and, just as importantly, keeps the effect live and editable.

Orient Tool

Rotated text and artwork often lose their rotation data in Illustrator. The Orient Tool fixes rotation faster and more accurately than lining everything up against manual guides.

The plugins Horst Signs relies on

PathScribe — Path and point editing that echoes what Composer offered, with far more power than Illustrator’s native tools.

Vector First Aid — Document clean-up that strips out empty paths and unnecessary clipping masks. Invaluable for customer-supplied artwork and web-sourced PDFs. The point-text alignment and text line-break features get singled out as simple but genuinely useful.

Phantasm — Quick, native photo edits on sketch photos, without the detour of unembedding and editing in Photoshop.

Smart Remove Brush — Essential for plotted graphics. It removes the excess points that lengthen cut times and spoil edges, without compromising the character of the path.

Dynamic Corners — A powerful equivalent to Composer’s corner tool.

Orient Tool, Rotate to Collision and Snap to Collision — More powerful and more accurate than the native snapping tools, and a real help when building and aligning artwork.

And the small stuff — Extend Path, Reposition Point, Lock/Unlock and Straighten: simple utilities that end up getting used constantly.

Measuring the impact

Putting a number on the time saved is hard, but across a ten-person team these tools collectively save hours every month. They’re used daily, on close to every project. One trucking client’s Instagram — full of vehicles wearing Horst-made graphics built with these plugins — has racked up more than two million combined video views.

Time saved, or better results?

Asked whether the biggest benefit is speed or capability, the answer was “both” — the plugins make the difficult-but-possible parts of Illustrator easier and faster at the same time.

These tools are the secret sauce in my workflow. The functionality they add saves untold time, makes my job easier and delivers better client results.