As a creative professional, you're always looking for new ways to bring your designs to life. Add-ons offer more tools, effects, and workflows to help you do more with your Adobe Creative Cloud apps. While there are countless plugins and add-ons available for Adobe applications, we asked our own design team to share some of their favorites. These 11 add-ons will save you time and effort on your designs — and add some cool new visual styles to your arsenal.
Give your vectors the look of hand-painted brush strokes with this add-on. Includes 26 illustrator brushes, including TIFF versions, painterly and splatter texture overlays, and two examples of professional quality reference art so you can see exactly how to use the brushes for best results.
35 lino cut brushes and 12 vector textures to give your work a handmade, hand-printed look, along with a set of brushes to create a unique woodcut effect.
Inspired by comics from the 1950s, this add-on uses yellow, magenta, and cyan overlays to produce an authentic vintage look in vector format. Also includes halftone variations, 3D shadows, text outlines, coloring tips and cheat sheets.
Give your designs the look of beautiful vintage travel posters with this add-on. You’ll also get 18 vector textures, a visual font list plus links to download them, and 13 beautiful photographs to use in your work.
All the metallic, glitter, and foil effects you could possibly want, in every shade of gold, rose gold, black, silver and copper. Over 200 swatches that include crumpled foil, gold leaf, metallic paint, textures, glitter, confetti, and geometric patterns.
140 raster pattern swatches, each with a light and intense style variation. Apply it with a click and it pulls your current vector color as the base color, then adjust the style via the appearance panel.
Edit vector paths with precision, create dynamic shapes and corners, convert and delete points, extend and trim paths, and more. Included is a smart remove brush tool to remove excess points, a path extend tool, dynamic corners and shapes tools, a PathScribe tool to edit vector paths, the dynamic measure tool for quick and accurate measurements, and a protractor tool.
Export objects from your AI docs to PNGs for all devices and screens. The add-on exports objects separately, so you can export artwork with a graphic layout behind it, and you can export designs scaled precisely for various devices and screen sizes.
Easily draw, edit, and dimension vector your artwork with these 87 tools and 12 panels. Hundreds of editable symbols for architecture, people, and landscapes that automatically scale to the target layer, plus a built-in dashboard to control CAD features in Illustrator.
Attach previews of your work to Wrike, update and track file versions, update task status, and quickly find instructions, creative briefs, and feedback comments without leaving Illustrator.
More Tools and Resources for Creative Professionals
Whether you’re a novice designer or have years of experience under your belt, there are always new shortcuts and techniques to learn. Check out our list of free online training resources for Adobe Creative Cloud to sharpen your existing skills or learn the ins and outs of a new tool. Then see how Wrike's solution for marketing and creative teams can streamline administrative tasks and free your time to focus on creative work.
Emily Bonnie
Emily is a former Content Marketer of Wrike. She specializes in leadership, collaboration, and productivity. Her brain is stuffed with obscure grammar rules, an embarrassing amount of Star Wars trivia, and her grandmother’s pie recipes.
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Why Your Marketing and Creative Teams Can't Get Along (Infographic)
Marketers: Do you bang your head against the wall after receiving yet another "final” design that completely disregards the creative brief and your feedback on previous iterations?
Designers: Have you ever strained a muscle rolling your eyes at marketers who leave vague feedback or stretch the original scope of the project?
Marketing and creative teams must work closely together simply due to the nature of their work. But working side-by-side, day-by-day doesn't automatically mean those teams have a strong collaborative relationship. Like any relationship, it takes commitment to nurture and maintain.
Take heart, however, if you're on either of these teams and struggling to work well with the other. A few simple tweaks to your communication style can make all the difference.
As this infographic reveals, most of the major sticking points between marketers and creatives boil down to poor communication:
Fewer than 40% of marketers say design teams follow the creative brief or ask questions to clarify expectations.
70% of marketers say their creative team doesn’t follow a transparent process, so marketers are left in the dark until the final product is delivered.
Fewer than 30% of creatives agree that marketers give useful and timely feedback. However, 46% of marketers say they do.
Fewer than 23% of creatives think marketers brief new projects clearly.
Source: Visually
Moving forward as a team
With a more mindful approach to communication and a little honest self-reflection, marketing and creative teams can start working together to achieve better results — in less time and with fewer headaches. The right collaboration tool can also go a long way in improving communication and transparency, and achieving productive integrated marketing communications. For help finding the right software solution for your team, check out Wrike for Marketers.
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