Rant: The day my free add-on broke my entire design file

I downloaded a free vector pack for a client project in Chicago last week, figured it would save me a few hours. Turns out one of the files in that pack had a corrupt stroke that somehow glitched my whole Illustrator document. I lost about 6 hours of work because I hadn't saved a backup in a while. The client deadline was the next morning and I was up until 3am rebuilding everything from scratch. Learned to never grab free assets without checking them first in a blank file. Has anyone else had a random download mess up their whole workflow like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

lucashenderson4d ago

Buddy of mine works in graphic design and downloaded a free font pack for a rush project. Turned out one of the fonts had corrupt kerning data that kept crashing InDesign every time he tried to adjust text spacing. He lost about four hours of layout work on a brochure for a real estate client. Now he always opens free downloads in a sandbox file first before touching anything important.

blairm773d ago

Saw a reddit thread a few months back where a guy found malware hidden in a free font pack from a shady site. It was a remote access trojan, not just corrupt data. He had to wipe his entire system and lost way more than a few hours of work. Your buddy got off easy, honestly. Now I only get fonts from places like Google Fonts or Font Squirrel that actually check this stuff before posting.