Compatibility

Yes. Randomill is compatible with both Windows and MacOS.

Yes. Randomill uses Adobe’s Common Extensibility Platform (CEP), and is therefore compatible with Apple’s new M1 Macs. You can view the CEP compatibility table here for more info.

There are two versions of Randomill. You can see what version you have by clicking the flyout menu of the plugin panel and reading the top line of the menu.

Randomill 1.x.x Requires Adobe Illustrator CC 2018 (v22) or higher.

Randomill 2.x.x Requires Adobe Illustrator CC 2021 (v25) or higher due to it using newer web technologies such as ReactJS.

Installation & Activation

After purchasing Randomill, users receive an email with a download link to the installer files. Just run the installers, and you should be good to go.

Windows users: you may run into a warning that Windows has detected an unrecognized app from starting when trying to install Randomill. In this scenario, click ‘More info’ and then ‘Run anyway’.

Once Randomill is installed, you can find it in the Extensions menu under Window > Extensions > Randomill.

  1. Open the flyout menu and click ‘Uninstall Randomill’ This will open up a file explorer window to where Randomill is installed.
  2. Delete the contents of that folder.
  3. Restart Illustrator.

On Windows, Randomill can also be uninstalled from the ‘Add or Remove Programs’ section in the control panel.

Windows:

Randomill 1.x.x is installed in:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\CEP\extensions\Randomill

Randomill 2.x.x is installed in:
C:\Users\%YOURUSERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\CEP\extensions\Randomill2

MacOS:

Randomill 1.x.x and 2.x.x are installed in:
/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CEP/extensions/Randomill

When Randomill is first launched, you will see a yellow banner saying the License is inactive. To activate Randomill, follow these steps:

  1. Click the ‘Activate’ button in the yellow banner.
  2. Enter the license key you received upon purchase into the text field.
  3. Click the ‘Activate License’ button under the text field.
  4. Randomill should now be activated! You should see a green banner that says ‘Activation Successful’ at the top of the plugin panel.

Randomill connects to the internet through Adobe Illustrator, so if Illustrator can’t access the internet, neither can Randomill. Make sure that Illustrator is allowed to make outgoing internet connections in order to activate Randomill. This may involve editing your hosts file or unblocking Illustrator from within your firewall.

Usage & Common Problems

This is a relatively rare bug where the color theme of Randomill failed to load for some reason. This bug should be fixed as of v1.1.4.

Processing large groups of objects can take a while due to the way that Illustrator allows external plug-ins and extensions to interface with it. For instance, random selection can take a while because objects are selected one at a time by having their ‘selected’ attribute changed inside of Illustrator. When you’re operating on thousands of objects at once, it can take a while. That being said, Randomill is optimized for performance as much as it can be. After testing performance of other comparable scripts/extensions, Randomill performs as good or better.

Randomill treats groups as single objects. This was intended to work as a way to cluster objects together during Randomization. For example, when randomizing colors in a grid of squares, you can group a few squares together, and their colors will all end up being the same.

Other

Have a question that’s not listed here? Head on over to the contact page, and send us an email.