Vector Studio 2.0 : Palette Shepherd



Ever get frustrated dealing with all those Illustrator palettes? Looking for a particular palette, but can't find it? Does your workspace get so cluttered with palettes that you can't find your document? Instead of arranging every single palette yourself, wish someone else could do the tedious work for you? If so, let Palette Shepherd be your guide!

Palette Shepherd lets you take snapshots of your current Illustrator working environment so that you can recall them at a later time. Similar to having multiple views of a document that you can toggle among, Palette Shepherd lets you save multiple configurations of palettes, called palette layouts, which you can restore with a single menu command. In addition, Palette Shepherd allows these layouts to be written out to files and loaded back in, which lets you use your favorite layouts from session to session. Palette Shepherd also includes a utility to arrange your palettes to the side of your work area.

In the following example, we restored a palette layout back from a cluttered one (Window>Palette Shepherd>SavedLayoutName1).

Also, instead of restoring from a saved layout, you can simply arrange current palettes (Window>Arrange Palette). You will notice that the tool tear offs are also cleaned up. This way, you can get "messy" while you work and let the shepherd do your cleanup.

Palette Shepherd really shines when you create theme layouts. A simple example is a "Layer Theme", which just shows a stretched Layers palette. This comes in handy when you are working with a complex document, like a map. You can also have a "Text Theme" with all text related palettes, or "Color Theme" with palettes relating to color modifications.

To make this plug-in even more useful, you can cycle though your palettes with a shortcut. The Cycle Palette command cycles through the layouts you have created. With the shortcut, you can easily go through all your layouts without even going through the menus!

For additional convenience, Palette Shepherd keeps track of the current layouts created and saves them out to a default file just before you quit from Illustrator. If you exit the program and come back, your layouts will be there, right where you left them!

[ Main ] [ Palette Shepherd ] [ Direction Handler ] [ Zoom Lens ] [ Sampler Tools ]
[ Retouch Brushes ] [ Wrinkle Remover ] [ Gradient Factory ] [ Gradient Texture ]

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