Adobe Illustrator Automation + Extensibility Useful Resources

By Nicholas van der Walle, Founder, Astute Graphics

Following my original article, Why Automation + Extensibility Define Illustrator’s Professional Advantage, here are some useful resources and links to get you started.

Training experts

One of the greatest recommendations I can make to organisations looking to empower their teams with improved processes, tools, and workflows is to invest in the expertise of an industry expert. I’m not talking about an “influencer” who typically works in isolation on unrelated projects — rather someone who has absorbed Illustrator, and the Adobe Creative Cloud suite of apps, and more over decades, with experience of their place and usefulness in commercial teams.

Experts can save months and years of trial and error to achieve measurable improvements and are not aligned to any one solution. One size never fits all.

The following list of experts is far from exhaustive, but I’ve limited it to one per country, and I can personally vouch for the quality of each. It may surprise you to learn that Astute Graphics has also used these experts in various ways to improve the quality of what we offer our customers: nobody should avoid learning from others!

Monika Gause, Germany (www.gause.de) — The author of numerous books on Adobe Illustrator, very active community expert and one of the most knowledgeable trainers utilising Live Effects to achieve astonishing results. What Monika doesn’t know about Illustrator… doesn’t exist.

Rob de Winter, Netherlands (www.robdewinter.com) — A regular favourite presenter and trainer at Adobe MAX, Rob produces enviable public and tailored training courses to the highest possible quality. He also a deep understanding of the entire Adobe suite and how to utilise the latest AI technology.

Laura Coyle, USA (www.lauracoylecreative.com) — Astute Graphics has worked closely with Laura for several years, entrusting important new educational videos to her for good reason. With an excellent design background, especially in surface (pattern) design, Laura conveys complex processes with perfect clarity.

Jean-Claude Tremblay, Canada — Getting more from Illustrator (and InDesign) with the use of ExtendScripts is JC’s focus, based on decades of perfecting pre-press workflow and technology. He now also produces an excellent set of off-the-shelf scripts for both Illustrator and InDesign: https://payhip.com/proficio

To gain excellent feedback and knowledge from the large number of Community Experts, head over to the Adobe Community pages. A very active and experienced collection of users can help with any automation questions you may have.

Equally, Astute Graphics has a very knowledgeable and active Slack-based community, where numerous experts within the team are also happy to help with direct responses. Simply join here.

Actions

One of the most underrated and least discussed automation features in Illustrator, Actions can be one of the quickest wins for all levels of user. Whereas Adobe does produce written documentation for Actions, I recommend you view one of several excellent YouTube overview videos that bring the power of Actions to life. This TipTut tutorial is one great example:

Remember: it’s safe to experiment. You can always modify or delete any Actions you create, and applying Actions to your artwork can typically be reversed with the Undo command. Don’t be afraid to try it.

ExtendScript

Designer and author, Sergey Osokin, produced this excellent brief overview, How to write scripts for Adobe Illustrator. It provides links to additional Adobe and third-party resources.

Specialists in Illustrator ExtendScript creation include Sergey and Jean-Claude (both mentioned above), plus Katja Gordeeva Bjerrum, Sweden (productivista.com). If you don’t know where to start, it is often best to bring an expert in to at least get your team thinking in a new way. It’s highly likely that their ongoing input will assist in long-term increases in productivity across your team.

JavaScript-based ExtendScripts have become very popular recently due to AI’s ability to generate ExtendScripts with relative ease. Plenty has been written about this (here’s an example), but one of the clearest agents of change has been the excellent MATE Extension. Experimenting with the creation of script code directly in Illustrator vastly improves how users seek to achieve results through trial and error.

Plugins

Astute Graphics is not the sole developer of plugins for Adobe Illustrator. It is relatively unique due to its breadth of solutions and the generalist approach — not seeking to cater for one specific industry. So where do you start if you wish to understand what these plugins can solve? Here are three important links:

• Astute Graphics’ YouTube channel

• The Learn section, with a myriad of written tutorials and latest feature overviews

• AG Docs detailing every single one of the hundreds of tools and functions

Astute Graphics also compiled this extensive list of specialist plugins that exist in the market for pre-press, cartography, data viz, CAD and much more.

Managing the resources

Once you dive into the world of automation and Illustrator extensibility, you will soon amass a wealth of vital scripts, Actions, settings, and more. This needs to be carefully managed across teams to ensure that these hard-earned commercial advantages are not lost or go out of sync between team members.

With automation, a process which is not fully aligned across an entire team can prove to be just as dangerous to quality results than no automation at all. Users become used to being able to click one button for what previously required numerous steps and don’t often question the output generated for them, as if by magic.

If an Action, for example, continues to be developed and refined, it’s essential that the team leader can trust in a mechanism to distribute and highlight changes to colleagues. In not doing so, similarly named Actions can produce technically different results.

This is where Astute Graphics’ unique Astute Manager solution comes to the rescue. It allows individuals and team to store and properly manage their workflow, graphics assets and Illustrator settings with a simple user interface. Simply click one button to back up your precious Illustrator setup, just in case it corrupts or is otherwise lost. Comprehensive team management capabilities ensure that assets such as Workspaces and Actions are distributed across team members, and locally installed in a single step.

For more information, please visit astutemanager.com.