Free For All: Adobe Illustrator Grab Bag

Pariah Burke

24 Illustrator Scripts. This collection of 24 separate Illustrator JavaScript scripts, which run in versions 10 through CS5, can save you considerable time and effort on basic drawing tasks. The Circle script, for example, draws circles containing a user-configurable number of anchor points. Although it doesn’t sound sexy, that’s a boon to anyone who’s ever needed to break a circle into equal segments for such tasks as creating pie slices and making equidistant tickmarks around a circle. Going in the opposite direction, the Remove Anchors script makes short work of deleting extraneous anchor points. You may not find a use for all the scripts in this free collection, but any serious vector artist will find at least a few of them indispensible. The download page includes author Hiroyuki Sato’s examples of, and instructions for using, each of the scripts.

Ai to Canvas is a plug-in that gives Illustrator CS4 and CS5 the ability to export vector and raster artwork from Illustrator to an HTML5 canvas element. Artwork may include animation and events to create interactive Web apps.

Ungroup All Script ungroups all grouped objects in a document in one fell swoop.

These rackcard, postcard, and business card templates include bleed, trim, and live area guides.

How about some Geometric Tinted Scatter Brushes?

If you have to make an Org chart Template, you’d probably rather not start from scratch. Now you don’t have to.

Wish you had a visual reference to the standard brushes included with Illustrator? You do, courtesy of ~Possy73. Download Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

Cartooning Brushes: The two brushes in this set help you recreate the feel of cartoon inking with natural media brushes.

Would you like some free Chalk Brushes?

PDF Pages to Artboards is a highly useful app that converts each page in a multi-page PDF into a separate artboard in Illustrator. Sadly, it’s Mac OSX only.

Make Photo Frame is an Illustrator action that adds a white frame and drop shadow to an image to create the illusion that the image is a photograph.

Have you grown tired of seeing the orange Ai block on your desktop or dock? Why not change Illustrator’s icon? There are many, many free application icons available to infuse Illustrator and other Creative Suite applications with a little variety. Follow this link to DeviantArt and this one to WinCustomize to get started with 300 or so alternative Illustrator application icons.

What can I find free for you? Want more free fonts? More Photoshop brushes? How about more online applications that do this or that for free? Tell me in the comments what you’d like to see in future installments of Free for All, and I’ll do my best bloodhound impression to track it down for you.
Please note: Free for All will often link to resources hosted on external Web sites outside of the control of CreativePro.com. At any time those Web sites may close down, change their site or permalink structures, remove content, or take other actions that may render one or more of the above links invalid. As such neither Pariah S. Burke nor CreativePro.com can guarantee the availability of the third-party resources linked to in Free for All.