Darty-Ai is a powerful plugin for Adobe Illustrator which takes the data-driven design workflow past the capabilities of Illustrator’s native Variables feature. It does so in several fundamental ways which flip the script on traditional dynamic art processing within Illustrator.
It is a brand-new streamlined creation and processing workflow based on the collected experience of variable-data users from various online sources throughout 10 years.
Importing & Reloading Data
The beginning of this workflow stars with one huge efficiency increase by being able to import data fast straight from an Excel workbook.
This benefits users with:
- Remote data-sources: use Google Sheets to access cloud data.*
- Removing the step for exporting a CSV file.
- Reloading the data quickly with a single button click in Darty-Ai.
- Elimination of all issues regarding encoding of characters affected by traditional CSV-based workflow.
- Elimination of local-based CSV syntax issues, such as the varieties of CSV across world regions where other delimiters than commas (,) are used.
Already, adding or editing data and importing it to work with Illustrator artwork becomes a breeze compared to the native Variable panel and its data-binding which can malfunction as ‘one-way-trip’ when a variable is bound to multiple objects.
The data-reload button helps substantially to bring in edits in quickly, avoiding having to re-export a CSV every time there is a change in data. This feature will be enhanced to make this process even faster in the future.
Importing Remote Data
One of the most convenient Darty-Ai data-importing features is the ability to access your remote data stored on platforms such as Google Sheets (Microsoft OneDrive is scheduled for future releases).
Use the same handy UI controls as used for local sheet data sources, for importing and reloading the remote data. With Darty-Ai enabling the collaborative dynamic design workflow through data-connectivity, creative organizations can be more agile than ever with creation of artwork for time and data-based campaigns.
Data-Binding
With native Illustrator Variables, the data-binding process is limited in terms of volume: additional variables add to the panel’s UI and slow down the Illustrator document itself. This is particularly true when the variables are “multi-instance”, when two or more items are selected and made bound to a variable.
In contrast, Darty-Ai introduces a tagging workflow which keeps the art-mapping responsibility outside of the Illustrator document. Darty-Ai tags are inside the Tags tab of the extension’s interface.
Multi-Instance Processing
Darty-Ai’s handing of ‘variables’ assigned to multiple artwork objects is light-weight. There are no duplicated elements representing a pairing one single artwork with a single variable. Instead, there are only tagged items, shown only once in a list of tags.
Coupled with the robust back-end engine, multiple affected objects are processed at lightning speed relative to the native handling, regardless of their amount.
Tagged-Item Utilities
Darty-Ai provides some helpful features to make the tagging workflow speedy and convenient.
Like Illustrator’s Variables, the objects which are tagged can be selected through the Tags UI by clicking a tag.
It also differentiates between tags at the top-level of a selection and the nested content’s tags of the selection.
Finally, advanced buttons allow one to automatically tag the entire document, or in a selection, according to the art object’s names in one single click. The same goes for untagging.
Text-Replacement Features
The next most-important feature of Darty-Ai to improve on the native Variables is text-replacement.
Unlike the native “Text String” Variable which only assigns text-data to the entire text-frame, the Darty-Ai mechanism has added “search and replace” as well as styling functionality. Not only can it still affect the entire text-frame, but it can also replace and re-style text in specific ranges of the text of that text-frame.
Being able to control font-choice and size through a spreadsheet is now made easy!
See Text documentation for full details.
Darty-Ai Illustrator Features
Too long to mention other than in summary, Darty-Ai brings a multitude of Illustrator features under spreadsheet-control outside the scope of native Illustrator variables.
These features range from toggling the overprint on a shape, affecting the paragraph style of a text, changing appearance fills and strokes, adding new effects and changing their parameters, to managing artboards and arranging layers.
Particularly creative is the ability to use Pathfinder together with effects and the Expand command to generate procedural artwork.
Stay tuned for upcoming blogs demonstrating more of these techniques.
Creation Workflow
The new super-charged and highly-creative templating workflow comes with Darty-Ai’s Preview feature: a preview “throw-away” document which is free for experimentation and testing with no need to worry of over-writing the original document.
This workflow prioritizes creativity by creating such a temporary document on every preview record, allowing the designer to make adjustments to art and edit in the original document (or paste into it/save over it manually) as well as the data.
A typical workflow may be visually examining an output in preview to determine if lengthy first-last name point-texts should have next-lines. The designer may see that for a given design, the multi-word line should have a line-break. They edit the data to have the next-lines in their data column and press the Reload button in the Data tab. Finally, they click the same record again to visualize the preview.
But, what if they decided that the text should also have an orange stroke when it’s certain rows, and a blue stroke when it’s other rows? The designer then places a stroke into the Preview document’s element of choice and dials in a visually desirable setting.
This now becomes an object they can paste back into the original template, or, if nothing else was affected they can simply overwrite the original document with the [Darty Preview] document’s contents.
Now in the data the designer adds a new column to affect the text element’s appearance and change the color of the new stroke with a formula that assigns a color according to their logic.
There is never an included bloated data-set of panel-based variables to have to detach from artwork just to rebind data, and no “Changed Data-Set” warnings: only unbridled creativity and unprecedented possibilities!
Exporting
Darty-Ai exports the variable-data documents from a robust configuration screen which can send files to unique destinations based on the data in 8 different formats, with multiple configurations.
Each of the 8 formats has a multitude of specific parameters, even dynamic-set passwords for password-protected PDFs.
As with Illustrator’s Export-for-Screens feature, Darty-Ai allows for adding multiple output versions of any format and varying settings with its Export Jobs.
In addition to most save and export features found in regular Illustrator, Darty-Ai’s Export screen comes with several custom additions such as being able to set a background to raster images with no document-art, and add padding.
These features more than surpass the native Batch Action exporting Illustrator comes with by default.
Darty-Ai Limitation: More features & Graphs
Currently, the only limitations Darty-Ai has are any non-supported Illustrator features which have not yet been developed within the Darty-Ai engine.
These are mostly advanced or obscure menu commands but also the Graphs. The graph handling is being developed for future Darty-Ai versions, the release plan of which is to be announced.
Graphs Workaround: Custom-Artwork Charts
For most simple graphs which can be made of a small amount of controlled elements, a “home-made” graph can suffice as a viable alternative!
It is very easy to make using Darty-Ai’s transformation method to scale shapes, or appearance method to set stroke dash-values for pie and donut charts.
Likewise, it is possible to use the align and distribute methods to create stacked bar-charts.
Couple this with being able to custom-style the artwork on the fly, and a “home-made” graph could be an even better option than the native graphs in some situations.
Finally, this approach brings an intuitive data workflow to data-visualization: these types of charts would not be intrinsically multi-dimensional; rather than having individual tabular data in external text-files, every field would be in the same main data sheet – along with the rest of the variables.
Future Roadmap
As you see, Darty-Ai is a powerhouse of a variable-data processor. However, it is pending the following future upgrades which shall be available to all new and existing subscribers upon completion.
The following features are in development:
- Advanced Graph support
The following features are in deliberation:
- Optimization for the duplicate method.
- “Command Mode” – affecting a current document for a non-export/non-preview edit, essentially putting Darty-Ai into “button mode”.
- Macros – storing re-usable data-rows to easily invoke “Command Mode” actions.
* Google Sheet support arrives June, 2025