MPFD – Art Director’s Toolkit

Mac Programs For Designers post number 5 is on Art Director’s Toolkit. Art Director’s Toolkit is a multi purpose program for every type of designer and also artists that use digital media.

The program has loads of utilities, and I will run by each one, along with a screen shot. 

The first is Number and in the main window pane you can convert decimals to fractions ad vice versa; this bit slightly goes over my head but what I do use more is the right hand side of the window pane were you can also look up page sizes so for example you can find the measurement of an A3 size page in inches, cm, mm, points, picas, and pixels. 

RGB, in this window you can pick colours from your screen so you will know the hex number, you can also create palettes of colours and save them. 

Blend calculates how colours interact with one another when the user selects 2 colours, as you can see from the screen shot I have selected two colours and at the bottom of the window I have been given a third colour. 

Swatch, this lets you look through thousands and thousands of colour swatches and also displays the RGB values, CMYK values, and hex number. 

Symbol, displays the keyboard input to get the specified symbol (this is really useful when typing up documents), and it states values such as the HTML code. 

Text, measures the height of the text that is specified by the user. 

Layout, allows user to create layout grids and you can copy them and then paste them into any program you wish. I usually paste them in to Photoshop and have them as my base layer when designing web pages. 

This utility also helps calculate reader spreads to printer spreads.

Ruler, gives you an onscreen ruler and it stays on top of every window on screen, and it allows the user to measure on screen graphics et cetera. 

Palette, once clicked it pulls down a bottom window pane and it stores all the colours you have been using through out the other utilities.

Overall I think you will find this program really useful, I am sure there will be some tools you won’t find useful, but because there are so many, there is sure to be some that you will find very useful.

The program isn’t free, but you can get a demo version that will last 15 launches, you can download that here from Code Line Software. And you can purchase the program from the Apple App Store by clicking here. 

Code Line also do other programs that can be viewed here, I haven’t any of them, but I may take a look into them!