Automating Adobe Illustrator

When using Adobe Illustrator for 30,000 orders, you need to have a system to store files so you can find them later.

Adobe Illustrator contains a scripting language - ExtendScript - which can be used to automate things inside Illustrator. Here are some examples. You'll find many large software packages contain embedded programming languages for automations.

Saving the initial file

To make it most efficient to store files, we had a single folder per item - this had the original artwork, any customer files, and output files ready for a machine. This keeps everything together and allowed us to come back literally years later and find everything again.

We had a one click button that opens the right template for the product that was ordered - right there, that saves 20-30 seconds each time in trying to navigate to the right folder to find it.

Then we had a one click button that saves the initial file - giving it a suitable name and filing it in the correct location. Instead of 30 seconds spent navigating to the right folder, it takes one second for the script to save the file.

This sounds like a simple problem, and it is. Let's be conservative with our numbers here. You save 20 seconds opening a template, and 20 seconds saving the file. That's 40 seconds per file. Multiply that out by 15,000 cake toppers over five years, and suddenly you've saved yourself 600,000 seconds - 166 hours. What would 166 hours of labour cost you? What can you do in that 166 hours? For just a few hours of investment in coding these automations.

Time highlight - Cake Toppers

Foote and Flame designed cake toppers - over 15,000 custom cake toppers over our 9 years. One key automation we built was to take a "proof ready" cake topper and turn it into a "cut ready" cake topper.

This meant:

• Expanding and combining all the cake topper shapes together.
• Adding corner radiuses to all sharp corners to increase strength.
• Creating a cardboard box insert to safely ship the cake topper.
• Exporting the cake topper geometry along with the box for the cake topper.

We originally did this by hand for each cake topper. It took about 60-90 seconds each depending on just how fast you were with the computer.

So I wrote a script to do this instead. In Illustrator, you just selected the artwork that was the final version, and then ran the script. 5 seconds later, everything is done and you can start on the next one.

Run those numbers. 55 seconds x 15,000 cake topper = 825,000 seconds = 229 hours. What else can you do with an extra 229 hours? For just a few hours spent coding this automation.

Exporting Proofs

Anyone who's worked with Adobe Illustrator knows you have to export proofs in PNG or JPG format to send to customers. But this takes time, as you have to go through several dialogs, and you can't easily customise the name of the files...

So let's code an automation for this. One button then:

• Exports all artboards to consistently named files.
• Can include the artboard name in the file to make it clearer - otherwise uses the index (eg, -01).

You'll save 20-60 seconds from jumping through dialogs to renaming files before you send them.