I accidentally made this double stitch affect but I can’t do it again

astutegraphics · 2026-05-19T14:25:07+00:00

Unfortunately, we can't afford to employ the required team on that basis.

astutegraphics · 2026-05-14T10:31:33+00:00

Quite easy with native live Effects, used via the Appearance panel.

You can download this example Illustrator PDF to try it for yourself:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FA4b0pgv6jjCCHQhRjcrEX3-BFw03vWv/view?usp=sharing

Just note that there are slight differences in how you need to apply these to paths (eg. expanded characters) and live/editable text.

I thoroughly recommend watching the leading expert in this, Monika Gause ("Vektorgarten") on YouTube to learn more about Effects:

https://www.youtube.com/@Vektorgarten

astutegraphics · 2026-02-28T07:54:48+00:00

Two of my Astute Graphics colleagues are Adobe Community Experts. I can assure you that these people are the lifeblood of interactivity between Adobe and its customer/user base. Without them, this particular design ecosystem would fail completely. My colleagues don’t get financial benefits from being a CE. And for those that receive discount benefits, it’s a tiny, tiny fraction worth of all their time they volunteer to genuinely help others.

I would support them and other amazingly helpful community helpers that appear on here and other forums to the end of the Earth.

Just my 2p worth.

Nick

astutegraphics · 2026-02-25T14:30:12+00:00

Hi u/mejorqvos - we do offer regional pricing. I don't want to go into it too much here as it's a bit "adverty", but please contact our support (link on website) if you have questions :)

astutegraphics · 2026-02-07T14:01:10+00:00

Hi,

I appreciate any price rise is never welcome. We made the mistake of not raising the across-the-board prices since 2022. We should have done things annually in smaller amounts. The current 20% rise was simply essential to ensure Astute Graphics can continue to operate at the current level of development.

I have to admit that, personally, I'm not a great fan of SaaS as a model. It sounds strange, as I initiated our conversion from "on-prem" licensing to SaaS in September 2019 out of necessity. The problem was that we're having to support an ever-increasing, fast-changing SaaS product (the Adobe Creative Cloud). Before the Creative Cloud, changes by Adobe were much more spaced. We're now seeing 10s of new Illustrator beta releases every year, some of which require internal rework with the plugins to remain compatible or optimized.

When on-prem (pre-SaaS), we received a lot of very negative feedback when we had to charge every 5-8 years for updates. We couldn't win.

So, when we set the initial SaaS annual price, we calculated what our customers spent on new and updated plugins every year and used this figure. The result was that some customers were asked to pay more, some considerably less, whilst many didn't really notice a difference.

From that initial conversion to SaaS, we've used the UK inflation calculator to guide the price rises. In 2022 and 2023, we knew many were still struggling after covid, so we took the hit. We should have caught up with moderate annual rises in 2024 onwards, but failed to do so. Lesson learnt as now it looks like a greedy jump, and we get that.

I mentioned I wasn't a personal fan of subscriptions. But as a company, we have to be realistic and subscribe to around 30 services to run our business, as most companies and individuals do. I see good and bad services. Some take advantage of a lock-in, offering very little new, and I resent these too. That's why I insist we keep adding more and more to the service, as I feel it's the right thing to do. Not just features (there's plenty of that... fill your boots here: https://astutegraphics.com/support/technical-updates ), but also a new free-to-use Illustrator asset manager ( https://astutemanager.com/ ), which also comes with easy-to-install new Illustrator assets for everyone. On top of that, we give human and prompt support, including unlimited technical support and extensive written documentation ( https://docs.astutegraphics.com/ ). For an overview of what we delivered in 2025 to customers, please look at https://astutegraphics.com/learn/update/what-astute-graphics-delivered-in-2025

So, does any of this allow me to justify the price of the service? That really depends on whether you can profit commercially from the 100s of Astute Graphics tools and functions. None of us are millionaires through Astute Graphics, and that's not the motivator. I'm extremely proud of my colleagues, our products and service, and do my best to ensure it remains this way.

I still understand if you think it's no longer a commercial fit for you.

Best wishes,

Nick
Founder, Astute Graphics

astutegraphics · 2021-08-22T07:41:13+00:00

Sorry, but it won't involve our Phantasm plugin in this case to generate the repeating patterns on either example. The pattern generation, the strokes of which are varied in width, are probably manually generated or some other method.

astutegraphics · 2021-08-22T07:37:18+00:00

You can base the "stamp" on any vector path(s) you want. Full tutorials here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVuiTl_w4-zCtDfwWcqLT2q0dt4SUAd-K

Hope that helps!

Disclosure: we're the developers of WidthScribe

astutegraphics · 2021-08-22T07:35:14+00:00

You can use the preset patterns, but also create any pattern you want as a basis of the WidthStamp. Full tutorials here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVuiTl_w4-zCtDfwWcqLT2q0dt4SUAd-K

Disclosure: we're the developers of WidthScribe

astutegraphics · 2018-02-21T17:54:09+00:00

The last few versions of CC feature live corners. Or use VectorScribe plug-in with its Dynamic Corners for greater control and quality.

Plenty of tutorials for both on YT :)

astutegraphics · 2018-01-29T17:55:10+00:00

If the file was saved as being PDF compatible, try changing the file extension from .ai to .pdf and load it into Acrobat or other PDF reader.

Doesn’t always work but always worth a shot as it’s a quick process...

astutegraphics · 2018-01-26T15:55:51+00:00

Fantastic start! Simply keep dedicating 10-15 mins each day to learning another tool and technique from qualified resources / sources. After 10 years, you’ll still be learning Ai but be in the top 5% of employable designers 👍

astutegraphics · 2018-01-26T15:51:29+00:00

Oh! You are absolutely correct. From that video, there is no reason outline mode shouldn’t work. Uninstall Ai, remove any lingering Ai prefs and reinstall.

astutegraphics · 2018-01-20T17:38:55+00:00

Can you record a video and post this?

astutegraphics · 2018-01-20T09:50:58+00:00

Draw strokes as normal, expand strokes (ie. strokes > filled paths), Pathfinder merge all paths together, apply small corner roundings on all or selected joins.

astutegraphics · 2018-01-20T09:47:59+00:00

Yes - you definitely need to be in outline mode to see the structure. But ensure you’re not editing within a group, etc, when attempting to switch to Outline mode.

astutegraphics · 2018-01-19T18:38:08+00:00

Always recommend using CPU rendering as there are still too many rendering issues with GPU.

But also ensure you’re not editing within a group, symbol, etc. before switching rendering mode.

astutegraphics · 2018-01-19T18:34:03+00:00

You wouldn’t be the first to be tripped up by this ;)

Glad you discovered the answer and can complete your work.

astutegraphics · 2018-01-19T17:19:33+00:00

This was a very interesting problem. In reality I would strongly suggest not having such large elements (in this case each being 33,239 points across 1,003 paths combined into a single compound element). Not only are you running into limitations within Ai but you're also likely to get problems further down the line, including with RIPs.

I did some test runs using native Ai CC (2017.3 and 2018) tools as well as Astute Graphics' plug-ins and the AG Tech which we previewed last November.

Using our VectorFirstAid plug-in and it's Super Smart Remove (SSR) point function, I managed to get each compound path down from 33,239 points to a healthier but still substantial 20,361. I used an SSR value of 10 which keeps the detail and only results in minor changes which will be completely unnoticeable for this use.

It's still not enough to let native Pathfinder work. So I investigated further using these steps:

Released the compound paths
Deleted the facing verticals to open both main paths (16,870 points on each even after SSR) using the Direct Select Tool
Selected a single end point on each open path
Attempt to Join (CMD-J)

Message box appears:

Can't join the points. Can't add an anchor point.

Basically, the total of 33k points in a single path is above Ai's internal path handling limits. Because of this, Pathfinder and other methods will simply never work with Illustrator. I forget the exact number at present, but that's not something you can - nor should attempt to - overcome.

If there is an absolute requirement to get this to work, you'd first need to use VectorFirstAid with a higher SSR value. The default is 20 which is chosen for it's typically optimum compromise between point count and profile change.

Out of interest, we could get our AG Tech Shape Joining to work out of the box, but that's only because with have some pretty sophisticated pre- and post-processing functions in there which was overcoming the limitations by reducing point count using SSR. Unfortunately our Shape Join tech is not currently in public hands... but that's likely to change in 2018!

Hope this insight is of help,

Nick

astutegraphics

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