Supercharge Illustrator With VectorScribe and VectorFirstAid
There’s a plugin for that …
Most discussions about Adobe Illustrator tend to focus solely on the off-the-shelf product and its core capabilities. And to be sure, Illustrator is powerful out of the box. But sometimes the native features do not quite do what you need or not quite in the way you need it. There is a very rich ecosystem of Adobe Illustrator plugins. Primary among the makers of those plugins is Astute Graphics, the minds responsible for VectorScribe, the most popular plugin for Adobe Illustrator among vector artists.
Two years ago we reviewed a few of Astute Graphics’s plugins and we asked whether they really improve the experience of creating vectors in Illustrator. In this article we will revisit one of those plugins, VectorScribe, and introduce you to a new one, VectorFirstAid. The article is organized to highlight features of likely interest to icon designers, primarily — we are an icon marketplace — with plenty for all designers. The order is based loosely on likely interest of each feature set to readers.
In general, Astute Graphics’s plugins extend Illustrator’s capabilities in three ways: One, they give you greater and more fine-grained control over Illustrator’s existing capabilities or add much-needed features that are natural complements to Illustrator. Two, they add much richer textures, patterns, and surfaces. Three, the plugins enable much more natural hand-drawing in Illustrator and mimic traditional drawing utensils and techniques.
Astute Graphic’s plugins can be viewed as enhancing Illustrator in three general areas: Creating vectors with great control, precision, and efficiency. Enabling richer patterns, textures, and surfaces. Allowing more natural drawing and mimicking traditional drawing techniques.
VectorScribe
Astute Graphics’s most popular and most powerful plugin is VectorScribe. The plugin is now in its third version with the new release in October, 2016. VectorScribe is a collection of functionality that is organized into four palettes: PathScribe, Dynamic Corners, Dynamic Shapes, and Dynamic Measure. Within each of these palettes are a collection of functions related to each of those broad categories. The focus of all of these tools is to give you greater control over creating shapes and modifying existing paths more precisely and more efficiently.
PathScribe
PathScribe is the powerhouse of VectorScribe. The simplest way to explain PathScribe is, quoting Astute Graphics themselves, “controlling the points and handles on vectors”. The different tools allow you to quickly change pretty much anything about a point including convert from a corner to smooth point or the reverse. Split a point (the opposite of joining). You are also likely to find useful, Smart Remove Point, Smooth Point, Convert to Corner, Extend Path, and Add Points to Tangents. The benefit of the latter is adding points to the outermost edge along a curve gives you better control over the exact shape of that curve while using fewer points.
Smart Remove Brush Tool
My introduction to VectorScribe came about as a result of hearing other designers talk about the “Smart Remove Brush Tool”. When you merge multiple shapes, or if you trace an image you often end up with paths that have dozens even hundreds of points you don’t need and that you certainly can’t use or manage. The Smart Remove Brush Tool allows you to click drag an eraser-like cursor over your paths and any points that can be removed without changing the shape of the path are automatically deleted. There is also a button in the PathScribe palette to remove single points that you have selected.
Points & Handles
PathScribe already includes a ton of features that greatly enhance Adobe Illustrator’s bezier curve tools including interesting additions to how one uses handles. PathScribe allows you to select multiple handles and manipulate them at the same time. There are also several tools for selecting handles based on direction. You can even copy and paste handles from one point to another, thus duplicating the corresponding curves.
PathScribe brings similar enhancements to working with points. One of the key features — and new addition to the toolbox — is the ability to add new or move existing points to the tangents. In other words, you can easily add points to the outermost edge of shapes such as circles. The benefit is that having handles at the tangents gives you much greater and more balanced control over the corresponding curves. You can also reposition points along a curve without changing the shape of the curve. So if the placement of a point and the adjacent handles doesn’t quite give you the angle you need to get the curve perfect, you can slide the point along the curve until you find the ideal location.
Dynamic Shapes
At first glance, Dynamic Shapes may seem like trivial fluff for unsophisticated users, but having a broad selection of ready-to-use shapes can greatly speed up your design workflow. Astute Graphics added seven carefully-selected new shapes to the repertoire that allow you to draw most objects using simple shapes. The new shapes include Arrow, Cloud, Crescent, Cross, Gear, Heart, and Speech Bubble.
When we are asked for guidance on how to design pixel-perfect, consistent, premium icons, one of the first things we advise is to use the Shapes tools in Illustrator as much as possible and to rely less on hand-drawing curves. Adding more shapes to Illustrator makes it much more likely an icon designer can find a prefab shape and not rely on building every shape from scratch. This is a great time-saver and can help make your icons even more exact.
Dynamic Corners
Dynamic Corners was introduced by VectorScribe long before Illustrator’s Live Corners feature. There was a time when creating rounded corners on a rectangle in Illustrator was a tedious task of meticulously splicing ellipses and rectangles. Even though Illustrator has added Live Corners, Dynamic Corners still offers a lot of value including quickly rounding, knocking out, or beveling corners. One thing we find is that in many cases where Illustrator no longer recognizes a corner as being “Live” in the sense that it can still allow you to round it by simply dragging the Live Corner handle, Dynamic Corners can still recognize the corner and allow you to round it either using the handle, the numbers palette, or clicking the corner to apply a preset value.
Dynamic Corners’s cursor helps you identify editable corners even hidden behind other layers. It will also often recognize corners as editable that Illustrator does not. The ability to set the radius in the Dynamic Corners palette and click more corners to apply the same value is equally useful.
NOTE: We have omitted Dynamic Measure because it is not likely to hold strong interest for icon designers. You can learn more about Dynamic Measure from this video tutorial.
VectorFirstAid
If you have experience doing print design you are, no doubt, familiar with PreFlight and other programs that check, and when possible correct, common issues in pre-press file preparation. Well, you can think of VectorFirstAid as PreFlight for vector files. It is packed with functions that correct common issues with vector files such as stray points, unclosed lines, empty text paths, unpainted paths, missing fonts, etc.
Another powerful use case is repairing imported PDFs. If you have ever imported a PDF created in Acrobat into Illustrator you are familiar with how the text blocks become individual lines or even individual words. Images can import as individual line segments, and a host of other issues. VectorFirstAid can repair them all in seconds.
Highlights
VectorFirstAid is densely packed with features and it would be a bit overwhelming to try to exhaustively list them them here so we will cover just a few highlights.
Super Smart Remove Point Tool — The save great feature you’ve grown to love, only now you can apply it to an entire file at once. One drawback to this ability, however, is that it will be more difficult to verify the results to make sure your paths were not distorted.
Remove Whatever — Okay, there isn’t really a tool with that name but VectorFirstAid does have several features to remove unnecessary elements such as stray points, empty text paths, unpainted paths, etc. Each of the items above should be mostly self-explanatory. I admit, too, that the first time I ran each of these I felt like a kid at Christmas.
Configure Custom Profiles — Not only does VectorFirstAid come packed with functions to correct common issues but it gives you the ability to create Profiles of grouped functions to run only the ones you want for different purposes.
You can even schedule the functions to run either at various time intervals or after a certain number of changes.
Conclusion
Adobe Illustrator, out-of-the-box, has some of the most powerful vector authoring features available. But even a tool as advanced as Illustrator cannot suit the needs of every users exactly. Plugins allow the software to be extended in powerful and useful ways. In this article we have looked at only a small cross section of enhancements made possible with VectorScribe and VectorFirstAid. Every designer will encounter many of the same challenges when creating but each designer will also have some unique needs or preferences. There is no question, in our minds, that Astute Graphics’s plugins do make the experience of using Illustrator better but what that means is subjective and will differ for each designer. Fortunately, they have plenty to offer. For more information about Astute Graphics’s plugins, or to start learning how to use the ones mentioned in this article, see the links below. For more information on premium icon design, refer to the related articles below.
Further Reading and Educational Resources
Icon Design Resources
- 6 Easy Steps To Better Icon Design
- Optimize Icon Design with More Artboards
- Prepare SVG icons for icon fonts
- Use Artboards & Export to Auto-tag Icons
- How Kickstarter helped bootstrap my new icon set
- 5 Tips to Making Your App Icon Stand Out
