Cheat your way into 2018

One of our most frequent requests by customers was for a series of "Cheat Sheets". These are printable documents outlining what keypress shortcuts are available for the vector design workflow tools Astute Graphics conjures up for Adobe Illustrator.

I am very happy to say that we are now complementing the scattered series of shortcut blog posts on our website with a very slick set of PDFs! Our blog author, Iaroslav, has been working closely with our amazing engineers and Dave Clayton (Astute Graphics' Training Manager) to public the definitive guide.

Available from the new dedicated Cheat Sheets page, you can grab your copy in either bite-size chunks per product or the full 43-page encyclopaedia.

Why the need to cheat?

All Adobe Illustrator users need to be allowed to concentrate on their core task, be it creativity, precision editing, pre-press preparation or other. All our plug-ins focus on providing huge time savings and boosting creativity. Keyboard shortcuts feature in many of our tools, which in turn allows access to otherwise hidden functionality or simply work even quicker.

Download and print out the cheat sheet for your favourite tool and product, place it in front of you for a day or two and shave even more time off your daily routine tasks. It's a no-brainer!

Beyond Cheat Sheets

I personally want to thank all our customers for another astonishing year. It's a year we released VectorFirstAid which has shot to the top of our customer's must-have list. It generated instant customer responses like Justin's:

I've had it 10 minutes and I already know it's going to be fantastic. It instantly fixed all the issues I had with an exported PDF - these are the bane of my life. Worth every penny.

In our 11th year, I realise more and more that's what we're about; fixing everyday issues designers have simply become numb to.

Perhaps our commitment to advancing the designer's workflow is best illustrated with the surprise demonstration of our Bézier and application chassis technology in November! The result of many years of hard graft by a very talented set of engineers, we're looking forward to making sure a wide audience can benefit from this in 2018. Keep you eyes open for announcements.

And there's more

If you think we've just been working on more great new Illustrator plug-in releases, core technology and training material in preparation for the New Year, think again! One of our most significant announcements will be initially benefiting all our existing plug-in users… but it's not a plug-in, or even design tech. Instead, earlier in 2017, we went back to the lab and looked at what our biggest pain point for customers is at present. And then how to not only solve that, but also how to give the Astute Graphics eco system a once-every-ten-years leap forward.

I really look forward to revealing this and so much more in the coming months…

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!