TOP 5 FREE Adobe Illustrator Scripts for Laser Crafters 🔥 | Save Time, Cut Better, Stress Less!

What is up? Welcome back. Do you like to do it, build it or make it? So do we. Today we're breaking down our top five free Adobe Illustrator plugins and scripts that save us time and money. If you want an easy way to create patterns, scale your images, clean up your clip art, export your color palettes, and put objects on a path, then this video is going to save you time and money because we know time is money. Do you want to make art or do you want to make money? I'm going to show you how to do both. [Music] But first, what are scripts and plugins? Scripts are little bits of code that automate tasks and functions, things like batch renaming or resizing an image. Plugins are add-ons. They're new tools or features for Adobe Illustrator. Think of them like powerups. They typically have an options panel where you can do a little configuration for them. Now, let's jump in and show you how to install them. Installing scripts is easy. Simply navigate to your C folder. Then, you're going to go to your programs. Then, you're going to go to Adobe. Then, you're looking for Adobe Illustrator. Then, you're going to go to presets, ensu, or US. Then, you're going to go to scripts. Now, right here, we're just going to go back to our downloads folder and we're going to drag in our clean Canva SVG. We'll say continue. Now, next time we open up Illustrator, our script should be installed. Now, the Foxy Huegh script is a little bit different. We're just going to go ahead and extract this. And now, wherever I say to extract this to, that's where all of the files are going to get dumped to. So, we're just going to say desktop, select folder, extract. Now, to install plugins, you're going to have to do that from Creative Cloud. So, once you find your plugin, you can simply click install, say okay, and we can see my plugins right here. Here's align it and arranger script number one. Fillinger. This is a script that we've downloaded and it's great for making patterns. We're going to open our K&NG blank 16inch door round template. This template is available to the made it and master it tiers. It's just a great place to start if you're doing door hangers. It gets your basic round circle with your ribbon holes. It has two half circles at the B, top and bottom. That's what these black bars are. And then, of course, it has your center banner. So, from here, we're going to go ahead and draw our object that we're going to make a pattern with. So, I'm going to use this polygon tool here. And then I'm gonna go up to use an effect distort and transform pucker and bloat. This is going to make our polygon into a flower. And I just recently learned how to do this and I think that is just so cool. So I thought I would show you guys too. Now, this is still a polygon, and it's not going to know how to recognize it as a flower unless I go up to object and expand appearance. Now, it is the flower. Next thing I'm going to do is click on the little half circle banner. This is just an open half circle, but what we want is a solid fill so that I can make a patterned backer here. So, I'm going to click on release pattern bottom. patterned bottom. Yeah. Yeah. Got to pattern that bottom. And so I'm going to once I release it, it does fill the object, but I still need to click to unite. You can see the little line around the outside. So the outline and the inside are still two different things. So I'm going to unite that. Now you can see it's one. I'm going to go back to my little object here and make sure it's filled with a color. In this case, it's still gray. That's fine. And I'm going to make sure it's sitting on top of my pattern. So, I'm going to hold my shift key, select the patterned bottom so that both the flower and the pattern bottoms are selected. And then I can just go up here to file scripts filling. And I'm going to leave these as default here. Resize value up to 70% of its original size. I want to rotate the items random. The item to fill is on bottom, which is where the patterned bottom is. It's a it's below it's below the actual object. So, it's behind the flower. And then I'm going to group all the items after I execute the script. So, I'm going to hit okay. And now when I click off, my flower is still here. We'll move that aside. And you can see we have various size flowers filling the half circle and they're grouped. So now I'm going to select the group of flowers. If I wanted to, let's say ungroup them and move some of these flowers around, I could do that too. But and for purposes of our demonstration here, I'm going to select the flower grouping and the half circle here. I'm going to try to Hold on. I've selected 10 different things. There's and the half circle the flowers and I'm going to go over here to my pathfinder tool and click minus front. And now I have create a patterned bottom plugin number two align and scale. This is a plugin that we actually got from Creative Cloud. Typically I have my files set up so that the backer is the tallest object and everything to the right is slightly smaller. These are all of the other layers. So to resize this, I can easily grab everything and with the aspect ratio locked, I can make this a 10-in high hanger. That was easy. Everything scaled. Sometimes I have my files nested to try to save on materials. And now making this a perfect 10-in backer and everything scale with it is going to be tricky. But what I like to do is go over to my ellipse tool and I can draw a perfect 10-in circle. I'll draw my circle. Come over here with the aspect ratio locked. Make it a perfect 10 in. Now I can come up to my window and with this plugin align and scale, I'm able to scale everything to the size of this circle. So first I'm going to grab everything here and we'll group it. Now I can scale everything up or I can scale everything down. This case we're going to scale everything down. So if I click on this, it'll tell me to select four points. Okay. So I'm going to use my direct select tool because I'm trying to select anchor points. So I'm going to select this object. I'm going to find an anchor point at the top. Hold shift. Find an anchor point at the bottom. Now come over to my 10-in circle. Find my anchor point at the top and find my anchor point at the bottom. And let's scale this smaller. So it just scaled everything to my 10 inch. Now I can delete this. And now I save this as my 10-in file where I'm saving material. Script number three is clean Canva SVG. As you know, we download a lot of clip art from Canva to start our designs, and they come with clipping masks, and they're a mess. So, Garrett created a super cool script that does a lot of that clean up for you. If you've ever exported a design from Canva and then tried to open it in Illustrator, you already know the mess you're about to walk into. Clipping masks everywhere, nested groups, empty paths, it's just chaos. Canva uses clipping masks for everything. cropped images, shaped text. They even use it for shadows. It makes your files look fine, but under the hood, it's a disaster for laser cutting. So, I wrote a script that fixes all that. With one click, it goes through the entire file, and it flattens all those clipping groups, ungroups everything, normalizes compound paths, and deletes all the invisible junk that gets left behind by Canva. For instance, inside my file, if I try to change the color of these leaves, let's just give it a fill of red. You'll see that I just get a block of color. Ctrl +- Z. And over here, if I want to change this wood grain to a different color, let's try to change it red. I get blocks of color. Ctrl + Z. That's because this has a bunch of clipping masks in there. So each one of these is just going to be a rectangle or a square. Over here we have the same issue. So what I can do is I can go to file. We'll go to scripts. We'll clean SVG. This is going to run through and remove all the junk. Flatten everything right up. So this found 17 clipping masks. Now I can come in and change these leaf colors without getting that big block. If I want to change the wood grain, I could do the same type of thing. We'll run the script. Clean Canva SVG. It's going to find all my clipping masks. You can see it running through, finding them all, and flattening everything out. 103 clipping masks. That would have taken me forever to get rid of, but now I'm able to change the color. So, let's make it some blue wood grain. So, if you're designing in Canva, but you're prepping in Illustrator, this script is going to save you a ton of time and frustration. Download it, run it, and get back to making cool stuff. Script number four, color export. This is another script that we created out of necessity. If you've ever wanted to export the color palette from your design, this script will do that for you. We needed to do this for our workshops, for our design files, and it's a great way to export every color that you've used in your design with the color block so you know what color it is and the name of the color that you used. Let's open one of our files that we'll use for the color export script. This is a personalized files that we created for some of our teen workshops. uh for each of the workshop files we will do a color export so that you can use the same color scheme that we have created or we do this also for any of the file packages that we create for any of our SVGs we'll do a color export. So to do that we're just going to go up here and go to scripts. Now this script is a little bit different. Uh we're going to run this script from wherever you want the file saved. So, since I don't want the file saved in the scripts folder, I'm going to run it from our desktop folder. So, I'm going to go up here to desktop and I'm going to click on the folder Foxy Hughes color script. And then here it is, Foxy Hughes color script export. And I'm just going to hit open. Once I do that, it does a quick export of each file color used in this design. And then it lets you know where it's placed the file. So, it's on desktop. Foxy Hughes color script personalized birdhouse folder. I can say okay. And then I can go back and head out to our desktop under the Foxy Hughes color script folder. You can see here it's created a folder for the personalized birdhouse script. Here's the color palette that it actually created. It's got each color and the name of the color. Now, if for some reason you used a color in your design file that didn't have a name, it would export the RGB colors so that you would know exactly what the color was that you used. But in this case, all of ours have names and so it exported the color name. We also include a little list of each of the colors in case you wanted to use that for something else. Plug-in number five, arranger or object on path. Have you ever tried to arrange objects in a circle, like maybe a clock face, put the numbers around evenly spaced, have them correct? It's close to impossible. I have a script that makes everything easy. We do a lot of military signs, so we make a lot of these patches. Now I need to align all of these patches around their bigger sign in the middle, but they need to be spaced evenly and kind of go around like a clock. Now each of these are its own SVG. I have them grouped. You can see all their little anchor points. Now there's two ways I can do this. There's the new way where I can go into object and say object on path. And now that I have everything selected, I have it all selected. It's going to tell me to select the path. So, I'm going to select this pink stroke that I have in here. Now, they're evenly spaced and it looks great, but I need them all upright. And I'm unable to do that using this object on path tool. All right. So, I got this one upright, but now everything else is skewed. So, Ctrl Z. Now, I'm going to do it using a different tool. I'm going to select everything. I'm going to go to window extensions arranger. This is a plugin. So, how this plugin works for the circle is it's going to go clockway. So, how this plugin works for the circle, it's going to go clockwise rotation, but it's going to take the bottom layer of my group, right? I have them all selected. So, down here, this one down here is going to be noon. And then it's going to go around from there. And this is going to be my last one down here. So, I'll select them all. Let's hide my layers. Now, this is the width and height. So, to make a circle, I'm just going to make it a 16in circle by 16 in. I'm going to keep it on center. So, at the center of the circle, the center of the object will be lined up. I'm going to keep it going clockwise. No starting angle. I'm going to leave it at zero. Nothing else. We'll say arrange. There we go. Wow, look at that. It's amazing. Just drag it in there. Now, if I need to adjust this because my circle is just a little too big, I can come in and say 15.5 and 15.5. Arrange. Oops. Just drag this back into place. This is really useful when Kim gives me a new patch to put in the circle. Now I can group these all together and then I can say center and center and I can get rid of my little pink reference line. These are the top five scripts that we use and they're the first ones that came to mind for us. There are tons of others that are out there. So, if you like this kind of content and you want to know more scripts that we use, let us know down below. And if you have one, share it with others. Leave a comment. Let others know what scripts you use that make your life easier in Adobe Illustrator. Maybe they'll make our life easier, too. Well, we're about out of time. A big thanks to the Make It Fam. We love you guys. And oh, oh, and don't forget about the jamboree. It's right around the corner. It's only like a week away at this point. Got to give a big shout out to our sponsors. Big thank you to X Tool, Eon, CMBB Acrylic, Houston Acrylic, Lonear Adhesive, Riley Black Pot Project, Monarch Pine, Logo Jet. Logo Jet is a premium sponsor. Proco. Oh, ProColored. Yes, we've have a ton of great sponsors. We're going to have a ton of great content at workshops for everyone. a lot of hands-on, getting your hands dirty, getting to play with the machines, a lot of networking and a lot of fun after the networking. So, this is just the start. We hope to be bigger next year and have even more things going on. So, stay tuned. And if you like these scripts and you like what's happening, give us a thumbs up, hit that bell to be notified of our new videos each week. Oh, I forgot to hit that subscribe button. Thought you were looking for something to balance.