I’ve gotten to the point where i feel I’ve got a pretty good handle on illustrator and what i’m able to do with it, and I noticed some graphic designers that I follow referencing using lots of illustrator plugins to enhance the program and add tools, brushes, etc.
Do you find them helpful? or “worth it” as far as price goes?
There’s one plugin for Illustrator I can’t live without now and that’s CADTools from Hotdoor. It’s a tad pricey but worth every penny.
That said, it really depends on what you do in the field of design and the ability of the script writer that determines if something is going to work for you and be cost effective. Where my work involves very large graphics, often requires working in scale, and requires interfacing with other finishing devices beyond the print machine (think CNC cutting, laser cutting, even waterjet and plasma cutting), just the dimensioning properties of CADTools alone is worth every penny I pay for it. Plus Illustrator has sucky arc support and this plugin helps deal with that.
Yeah alot of the ones that sounded great and useful to me came with a pretty high price
Illustrator comes with most everything most designers need. There are really good specialized add-ons, like PD mentioned, that can be useful for specific purposes, but as you noticed, the good ones come with a hefty price tag.
In your situation (high school), you’re probably better off working on your design abilities than focusing too much on tech solutions to what are actually gray matter thinking problems. Way too many new graphic designers get sidetracked off into thinking that learning a bunch of programs will make them better designers, when, in reality, design isn’t so much about the tools as it is about designing effective solutions to visual problems using whatever tools might be needed.
That’s true. I haven’t really encountered anything completely insurmountable for vanilla Ai yet. Thanks for the help!
Here’s some cheaper ones
ColliderScribe $20 by Astute Graphics is the one I’d recommend first , it has a few fancy features too, but basically with it’s collision space set to zero, lets you snap things together very precisely and easily, and without zooming
Something Illustrator struggles with…
Also their SubScribe $7 is great for drawing tangents
and aligning objects.- like if you have a rectangle that’s not 90 degrees to the artboard.
if you fancy trying your hand at isometric drawing
IsoTool free here , makes it a lot easier
These sound great thank you
Best Adobe Illustrator Plugins