Nicolas Dufresne made a tapered stroke preset for After Effects, and it’s free.

If you are looking to do what may seem simple graphics styles in After Effects like a tapered stroke, you are in for a bad time. There isn’t one dedicated tool for this, but some people have hacked together something that works using text layers and expressions. It isn’t the most efficient way to create a variable width stroke, but here we are. If you are not one to follow along with tutorials, use expressions and hack one on your own, there is some good news. The creator of DUIK Nicolas Dufresne is offering a free preset that you can download and use – DuStroke. Pretty much refreshing in a world where it seems that every simple little thing in the motion graphics community around Ae is “a product begging for your fatass dirty dollar,” as Maynard once said in a song.

DuStroke lets you create tapered strokes in Ae and do a lot with them. “All of these are Bezier Shapes, and everything is 100% parametric and animatable, and 100% made with text layers without any plugin,” Dufresne says. You can alter the color throughout the stroke, and you can also play around with some of the settings to get some neat looking effects too.

Check out and download DuStroke here.