Astute Graphics - Hereford

Anthony C. M. Vaz

Amazing plugins that save a lot of time and money for us graphic designers.
It's that kind of investment that a first you think: Is it worth all that money?

But then, as you start using all the exceptional features, you just get addicted to it and think: Why haven't I used or discovered it earlier?

It's a must-have tool for any serious designer carrying about his/her professional future. Adobe Illustrator just get a new feel and powerful enhancement the minute you install it.

The learning curve is fast and with the supporting videos and daily tips just make it even easier to extract its maximum power.

Congratulations to Astute Graphics for the excellent job they are doing for our graphic community.

Randy Willoughby

Astute Graphics makes a lot of really cool plug-ins that extend the capabilities of Adobe Illustrator. In fact, many of them are essential for anyone doing professional work with Adobe’s venerable software application.

The plug-ins range from tools for shape-making, shape and path-editing, color editing, adding texture, fills, and effects, to tools for removing unnecessary Bézier points/handles, decreasing file size, measuring, to preparing art for printing—all the plug-ins save lots of time over the processes involved natively within Illustrator, and most of them aid considerably in keeping the user inspired creatively, since iterating and changes are fast and easy.

There are many plug-ins to help give the sterile look of vector art that analog and human-made appearance, such as texturizing a flat area of color, or adding very natural-looking tapering and unevenness of line quality. Drawing tools allow you to modulate the stroke as you are drawing, and a very cool way to draw with a mouse that eliminates the errors caused by mouse shake make drawing paths fun and easy. Effects that look like halftones, engraving or etching are easy to accomplish. Stipple effects and areas filled randomly with objects that would take hours can be done with a few mouse clicks, and allow for a myriad of options. Path offsets, sophisticated vector drop shadows and more turn the user into an instant ‘70s-era pop artist.

Anyone who creates technical illustrations needs this set of plug-ins too. They are incredible time-savers. Adjusting stroke width and taper are simple. Creating and adjusting shapes, drawing smooth accurate curves, positioning, straightening and aligning elements is fast and easy.

Everything is well-engineered and implemented. For instance, the hue and saturation color adjustments actually create visually pleasing results, rather than just moving color values correctly mathematically. Even the Astute Graphics Manager, which controls the installation and management of all the software works seamlessly along with Illustrator. The software is virtually free of bugs or glitches, and if there are any, the engineers are on it quickly with updates to fix any issues—very reassuring. Compatibility with Illustrator updates are also always a high priority, so you’re never waiting. The tutorials and customer service are first-rate.

Perhaps my only major gripe about the plug-ins is that they span a plethora of capabilities, so much so that oftentimes I end up rediscovering a capability within the suite of tools/effects that I forgot about, and sometimes remembering where to access all the tools and features can be frustrating. Also, feature updates can sometimes be difficult to keep up with, since they are constantly reevaluating their feature sets and incorporating customer requests.

I believe the annual subscription price is very fair, as Astute Graphics are always updating their plug-ins to ensure compatibility, they create easy to follow tutorials and other quick how-to videos, and are very receptive to customer feature requests. Pretty much every plug-in is designed to help the user do things quicker and easier, which saves money, adding tremendous value. Plus, new plug-ins are always on the horizon, and every time a new one is added during the course of a subscription, it is useful, increases Illustrator’s capabilities that much more, and is fun to discover uses for. Highly recommended.

Ian Murray

Software is great, BUT the licensing, download and upgrade process has aways been terrible. Now they are moving onto a new platform to sell/ licence the products. My experience of this is also very poor, the technical support is poor and understanding of customers needs also very poor.

Brook Banham

Astute graphics are soooo hard to deal with in general. Trying to update the app is a super pain. Then using the tools is very difficult and not intuitive. The training vids they use to teach their tools is confusing af. Not recommended at all.... unless you want a headache.

Jeremy Mura

Great plugins that are big time savers for designers and illustrations that use Adobe Illustrator. I recommend!

George Coghill

Very customer-unfriendly software company. Frustrated by my entire experience dealing with them. Do not feel appreciated or valued as a customer, and it doesn't seem to bother them that their customer service turns customers into foes instead of fans.

Brian Gibbs

An exponential expansion of Illustrator. Indispensable, delightfully capable, powerfully useful. The best.

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