This article was published 9 years ago, therefore the contents of this post may be out of date.

So in the past I’ve published posts showing you Adobe InDesign, Photoshop plugins so now it’s time for Illustrator. Illustrator may not have the number of plugins that you see in Photoshop.

Extending the abilities of Illustrator isn’t usually necessary, that we use plugins with Photoshop nearly all the time, but Illustrator plugins are also here to save time and effort. These plugins won’t cause a outbreak in your workplace, but these will enable you to do certain tasks quicker.

Most of these plugins featuring today are designed for most updated versions of Illustrator (Ai), that can adding some functionality to the updated versions like Creative Cloud and some plugins still work on those older version as well..

So below you will see a small bunch of great Illustrator plugins that you integrate into your Illustrator.

1. TimeTracker (CS6-CC)

TimeTracker-(CS6-only)

Stop grumbling at your timesheet!, TimeTracker is the only extension that automatically captures your activity (privately for you!) and produces a timesheet on demand. It is pure magic for creative professionals. This extension was developed by a former Adobe employees for the world’s top designers, you’ll be impressed by the utter simplicity that makes it almost fun to do timesheets! Simply install the TimeTracker extension, login, and work as you normally would. Focus on your craft, not the administrative tasks of tracking time. TimeTracker automatically captures your time when using your favorite Creative Suite applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Incopy and Flash .

2. Zoomize

Zoomize

Zoomize displays your Illustrator artwork in actual size and now you can also Zoom to Fit and Zoom to Size With Zoomize, you can preview font size legibility without having to print, compare your artwork’s size to real life objects, or if you have a product drawn 1:1, you can see just how big it is. If you have *CapSize installed, you can zoom to any scale set within *CapSize.

3. Colorist

Colorist

Colorist is a fast and accurate tool for editing colors and creatingcolour palettes in Adobe Illustrator. There is three different colour tools in Colorist. Tweak yourcolour in precise steps, use randomcolour with range controls or setcolour easily to selected items. Try it out for yourself! You’ll be amazed on how Colorist will speed up your workflow.

4. Color Tweaker

Color-Tweaker

Color Tweaker is super easy tool for tweaking your artwork colors in Adobe Illustrator. You can easily change your colors from dark to light or just tweak the chosen color channel. And with “Random Colors” you will find fancy and great ideas for your color schemes! Color Tweaker deals colors in RGB values, but it also works in CMYK mode by converting colors through RGB values.

5. HandleGlue

handleGlue

Moves the selected end points of the foreground open path to the nearest point on the other selected paths. This process includes adjustments of tangency of the handles.

6. SVG Now

SVG-Now

An alternative SVG exporter for Adobe Illustrator which outputs clean and lightweight SVG files from your existing AI or SVG files, thanks to the awesome SVGO project.

7. Ai2Canvas

Ai2Canvas

The Ai->Canvas plug-in enables Adobe Illustrator to export vector and bitmap artwork directly to an HTML5 canvas element using JavaScript drawing commands. Animation can be added to control rotation, scaling, opacity, and motion along a path. Then, events can be used to trigger other animations. Finally, the exported HTML and JavaScript can be extended and used in your own applications running on the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera.

8. Illustrator Layer Exporter

Illustrator-Layer-Exporter

Layer Exporter lets you automatically export Illustrator layers to SVG, JPG or PNG files, along with coordinates data and HTML CSS files, with a single click. Think of it as a modest equivalent of Photoshop Asset Generator for Illustrator, with full HTML & CSS export.

9. Magic Exporter

Magic Exporter is a plugin that been developed with the aim of simplifying the process of artwork export from Illustrator to web-ready PNG files.

10. Select Menu

Select Menu is a time saving plugin that adds 18 extra functions to your ‘Select’ dropdown menu that you will see isn’t included in the basic version of Illustrator.  At first it may not be entirely obvious to you, what selection types are missing from it’s default setup, but in reality this plugin will definitely save you a lot of time.

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Using Illustrator? Try one of these Plugins Out