Like similar apps, it does have a learning curve associated with it, especially for new or general users, but the sheer quantity of easily accessible tutorials should have you creating stunning vector art in no time at all.Īside from Illustrator, Affinity Designer still has little competition, though there are a few Illustrator alternatives worth mentioning. (Image credit: Serif)Īffinity Designer is a capable and reliable piece of software. Affinity Designer 1.10 review: usability and what’s missingĭesigner’s tools will feel familiar to those with vector experience. Not only does this help with your workflow, but with the raster brushes in situ, it also allows you to add that much maligned texture or 'noise' otherwise missing from vector art. While in Affinity Designer, you can switch from the Designer persona (vector) to the Pixel persona (raster/bitmap) without changing apps. The ability to manipulate pressure sensitivity and gestural mark-making give you more control in variance and tone.Īlthough not a new feature, the ability to switch ‘personas’ in Affinity Designer only adds to the smoothness of the app, if not the whole suite’s, usability. Of course this all becomes a lot more fun and expressive with the use of a stylus and a drawing tablet, even more so with one of the best iPads for drawing and an Apple Pencil (see our Apple Pencil deals post if you need to invest in one). The ability to tweak, edit and reassign different brushes to strokes gives you more than enough wiggle room, so-to-speak. Investing time and energy learning could be a waste of time as it may not be around in the future.Raster brushes can be used in situ, without leaving the app (Image credit: Serif)Īffinity Designer is certainly not as expressive a program as Corel Painter, but its vector brushes are not to be sniffed at. It's cheap, although it still remains less powerful that some free apps CONSĭevelopment seems to have ground to a halt on this app. Since going cross-platform there have been many reports of Designer's instability and since the implementation of Apples Metal API PROS The developers themselves are notoriously unresponsive to please for further development. Convert to curves produces hilariously unusable results and things like Offset Path simply don't exist. Furthermore, many tools are very poorly implemented. These are tools which are actually provided by many free editors. With the exception of skew, vectors cannot be distorted in any way (including perspective) and it even lacks a knife tool. So we're left with an app which lacks some of the most fundamental vector editing tools. I wouldn't wish to speculate if this software will even be supported in a few years. The developers have moved on to other projects, and it seems to me that for all intents and purposes, development on this software has been abandoned. The few updates which have come down the line have focused on things like the app icon. It's been two years now and not a single thing on that list has been implemented. Back when I first purchased this app the developers were promising a roadmap of future improvements which would bring it closer to some of the industry-standard vector apps out there. Not really a finished app I have been trying to integrate Affinity Designer into a professional workflow for a number of years now but I've come to the conclusion that it's just too painful and there is nothing to indicate that this will improve. You can still open them but all the layers groups will be merged into a single giant group making you spend some time rearranging things. ![]() Another thing that you may feel limited is that you see templates for Illustrator everywhere but not for Designer. For that, I have to use Inkspace but everything else: Affnity Designer. ![]() The only thing I cannot do in Affinity Designer so far is to get a PNG and trace it into a vector. You have it ready to use and installed properly. The controls are very intuitive and easy to use, the results are way too good and so far, after all these years there's nothing I regret from using Affinity Designer If you buy a set of tools on the Serif store, you do not have to download them and install them on a certain folder, you just go into the panel, click, that's it. PROSĪffinity Designer is the best Adobe Illustrator alternative that will let you edit SVG, AI, EPS, PDF files with ease. I have the whole suite working together: Designer, Photo, Publisher and it helps me stay on a competitive level against other businesses offering the same services.
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