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Affinity Designer Review |
Affinity designer software review free
I absolutely love it! Nothing that I can think of at the moment, all is rainbows and smiles after few years of using it. 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.
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.
It's been two years now and not a single thing on that list has been implemented. The few updates which have come down the line have focused on things like the app icon. 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. I wouldn't wish to speculate if this software will even be supported in a few years. So we're left with an app which lacks some of the most fundamental vector editing tools.
With the exception of skew, vectors cannot be distorted in any way including perspective and it even lacks a knife tool.
These are tools which are actually provided by many free editors. Furthermore, many tools are very poorly implemented. Convert to curves produces hilariously unusable results and things like Offset Path simply don't exist. The developers themselves are notoriously unresponsive to please for further development. Since going cross-platform there have been many reports of Designer's instability and since the implementation of Apples Metal API.
Development seems to have ground to a halt on this app. Investing time and energy learning could be a waste of time as it may not be around in the future.
Overall, this program has been more beneficial than any other art program I've used. I create coloring books and the vectoring tools have made the process so much faster, easier, and cleaner looking than the hand-drawn rastered techniques I was using before.
This is the easiest vectoring program I've ever used for lineart and I'm amazed at its affordability compared to insanely-priced subscription services like Adobe. I only have two gripes with this program. When I'm done with a lineart, I want it to be one layer-- not thousands. Would really like to see this issue fixed. I looked at a lot of free and inexpensive art programs that had positive reviews but I finally decided to go with Affinity Designer plus Affinity Photo and Publisher because I really wanted a vectoring program and I liked that the 'Affinity Trinity' programs effectively replace Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign when used together.
I was starting to have glitches with my very old copy of Photoshop and there was no way I could afford the subscription for the latest version of the program. I use Affinity Designer on a daily basis, to create graphics and assets for video and animation, as well as all the graphic design needs for my job.
Strongly support the vision and accessibility of Affinity compared to the Adobe rent software model. Love the fact that all updates are also free and they just keep on improving, you go Affinity. Very powerful and well rounded design software. It takes some getting used to, switching from Adobe Illustrator. The learning experience was fast for me, although there is not "much to learn" due to the lack of features.
But overall, I am satisfied with this software because of all the value it provides. I love that this is a one-time purchase software that is really cheap for small studios and freelancers. If you make any amount of money with design, there is no reason why you should not get Affinity Designer. Blazingly fast, you can scroll, zoom, and create designs super quickly and smoothly.
I love the fact that you can use it for basic "Photoshop"y things as well. The pathfinding options are clunky. Lack of useful features like "blend tool", "shape builder tool" Lack of basic features like a vector-based pattern fill. Edge artifacts when exporting. Industry: Marketing and Advertising. The affinity designer software is very easy to use and allows you to create images is allows motion design and more on touch screen. View all reviews. Graphic Design Software.
Affinity Designer. Affinity Designer Software. Visit Website. Affinity Designer is a graphic designing and UX solution that helps businesses create concept art, logos, icons, UI designs, print projects and mock-ups, among other illustrations.
It enables web designers to build and preview gradients, adjustments, effects, transformations and curve edits in real-time. The built-in vector tools let employees use custom pens, nodes, brushes and pencils to add contours, create abstract shapes and design offset paths. It enables team members to build grid patterns, create isometric planes, manage pixel snapping and handle alignments.
Additionally, it lets users handle multi This software successfully edits and creates pixel layers and may be called a decent Ps alternative. However, it is still doubtful whether Affinity Designer is suitable for the designers working in both software. Designer and Photo are compatible with Mac and Windows, as well as iPad applications. Serif Affinity Designer offers a great number of wonderful options combining pixel and vector tools.
It is one of the best graphic design software on the market, attracting users with its cheap price and efficient functions. Affinity Designer managed to significantly change the world of graphic design. Developers have been improving it for 5 years and finally created a powerful program that successfully enhances your designs and implements the most creative ideas. Go on reading and you will learn more about this software and its features. It is a modern and intuitive tool that is really easy to navigate.
Therefore, professionals, as well as amateur designers, will find the necessary tools without any difficulties. Beginners will be pleased to have all the tools clearly organized. They are easily accessible and greatly simplify the working process. In Affinity Designer, complex vector and pixel-based artwork is completed using the standard pen and shape tools.
There is also a Persona toolbar dividing vector, pixel and export tools into three separate sets. It is loved by many users because it greatly simplifies the working progress and saves much time.
The most appealing thing is that you can switch between Persona sets with one mouse click and without interrupting the working process. It seems like this software combined the best features of Illustrator and Photoshop. Designer Persona is a default tool bar to work with vector graphics. This set offers tools to draw shapes and curves, vector brushes, options to fill and stroke, transparency controls, place and crop tools for pictures.
It is very similar to Illustrator. Both Personas have a Pixel Preview button. Click on it and you will see how a vector graphic will look as a raster one. Pixel Persona offers tools similar to those of Photoshop features. For example, various shape marquee tools, artistic pixel brushes, an eraser, a freehand selection tool, a tool setting solitary pixels on the canvas. Moreover, you may apply photo manipulation tools, such as dodge, burn, smudge, blur and sharpen.
Speaking about the brush tool, it offers many artistic options. Thanks to this feature, digital painters and artists choose Affinity Designer for their workflow. Export Persona is a toolbar where you can choose particular areas on the canvas and export them as new graphics.
Affinity Designer review | Creative Bloq - A Little Background on Affinity Designer
Not hopeless, but not easy on the first try. No, the only nitpick I have is the same about all of Affinity's products. To update them, you have to manually download and install the newest version. Each product is half a gigabyte in size. Multiply that by three because all three share the same updates , and it can get expensive on your hard drive if you don't have that delete key ready.
It would be nicer if they had an auto-updating option available for those who trust the integrity of updates. But that's about it. Oh, and Affinity likes RAM. Lots of RAM. When I saw what Affinity Designer and Photo and Publisher could accomplish as a complete design layout suite, and when I saw how little I had to spend to access such power, I couldn't justify leaving it behind.
It was literally a case of "I don't know if I can afford to buy this, but I do know that I can't afford not buying it. And I could afford it. I've been using PaintShop Pro as an alternative to Adobe Photoshop for years, but I've always found the quality of the end result lacking in comparison. But for more extensive work like compositing or typography two things I need to do to create a salable book cover , it shows its weaknesses. And regarding vector graphics, it's about as basic as it gets.
I've always appreciated PaintShop Pro's price point, which is why I've justified upgrading every few years. But when I discovered I could buy a stronger and more capable program for even less, Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo, for that matter was a no-brainer purchase.
Thanks to the Affinity suite of products, I can't justify using any other design tool for my needs, especially not for the cost.
Industry: Information Technology and Services. We use Affinity Designer for a myriad of things - from designing logos and graphics for websites, to making merch design for our web comic. The great UI and amazing performance are an upgrade from our previous vector design software.
Affinity designer is the software I was waiting for as long as I remember. It has all the options of the mainstream competition, but for the fraction of the price. The best part of it is that Affinity Designer does what it does perfectly. But, the thing that attracted me to the Serif software, Affinity Designer and it's sister products Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher, is not only that. They offered their software for absolutely free for three entire months when the COVID pandemic started, and then for another three months later on.
They were not only the best, but the most human and kind. And that is the kind of company I want to give my money to. The affordable price and the completeness of the package were the middle ground between the expensive and the free option we were looking at. We switched to Affinity software because we fell in love with the companies spirit.
They offered their product for free to those who needed it the most. Needless to say, we bought the full suite after just a few days of use. Discovering Affinity was, to me, as exciting as making my first steps in vector design years ago. Overall, I recommend Designer, along with the other Affinity apps, but I have something of a love-hate relationship with them.
I love that we have real alternative to Adobe's products. The tools are powerful, and in many areas they shine brighter than Adobe's tired old offerings. On the other hand, some basic usability issues seem to hang about forever. It's almost impossible to judge any vector illustration software without drawing comparisons excuse the pun to Adobe Illustrator, and in many ways Affinity Designer compares very well.
It certainly feels fast, as a modern, native Mac app should. And unlike Illustrator, you can buy the app for a very affordable one-time purchase—no monthly subscriptions. Affinity has done a great job of unifying mostly all their apps, and this has to be mentioned too—Designer exists as part of an ecosystem, which for many designers, makes it the first genuine alternative to Adobe's Creative Cloud. I have not found the transition from Adobe apps to be an altogether easy one. In some part, that is just the nature of switching from tools that one has grown very familiar with over many years.
But some of it goes beyond that. Some of these issues have been raised over and over again on the user forums, but Affinity seems very slow to address them. The ability to create and edit files in one and seamlessly switch to the other e. I create several print-ready images every month and used to pay a LOT more for CC, which started to become a burden.
Switching to Affinity saves me a lot of money and also time. Not a complaint, but if this software could somehow use all of the thousands of Photoshop plugins and filters out there, it would be incredible. Mostly price. I also did not like all of the additional drivers and misc stuff that Adobe installed and keeps running all the time in the background.
I love this tool for graphic design. The learning curve is short, the tool itself is inexpensive no recurring cost and I look forward to use it on a daily basis - it's so intutive. This software can be bought for a low price one-time unlike Adoble Illustrator which demands you pay monthly license fee. The software is easy and intutive to use and I was able to learn the essentials within a week or so.
You get basic photo editing features like selection tools for cropping, blending modes, etc. Certain useful features like gradient map, 3D, mockups, etc. But I am OK with this - too many features make us forget essential ones. Besides, the magic wand tool available in Affinity Photo is not available in Affinity Designer - for precise cropping of people, etc.
I wish Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo were a single software. I know Inkscape is free, but Affinity Designer has an awesome community on Facebook. I love the energy and enthusiasm around this product. Affinity designer is super cost-effective. They have a lot of support on their website and tutorials on YouTube. The program tends to frequently close out by itself. I think it needs a little more work and to be easier to use. I saw ads for the Affinity suite in the past, but always dismissed them as one of those half-baked knock-offs of photoshop that like to rope you in with "free"trials that don't let you save your files or something.
Turns out I was very wrong! Affinity Designer and Publisher are both legitimate and very good pieces of software. They are feature rich, have some innovative features that aren't seen in other software and have ongoing development with regular updates.
Affinity Designer is quite intuitive, can do most things Illustrator can, can open and edit Illustrator files, so the transition was very smooth, with hardly any learning curve. Still had to google some to to figure out how certain operations were done in Designer that were different to Illustrator, and grapple with a few odd choices the devs made, over all I've been pretty pleased with Designer.
Decided to transition from Illustrator because it didn't make sense for us to pay for the subscription model because we only need to use it several times a year for creating product labels, and starting and cancelling subscriptions constantly is just cumbersome.
Plus we already have a Photoshop and Lightroom subscription. I tried to move from Illustrator to Inkscape in the past, but that was just impossible, Inkscape can't open Illustrator files properly even PDFs and lacks so many features that it wasn't possible to use for what I needed it.
Coming from Illustrator, it's very easy to adapt to, just minor differences in some workflows, but mostly it's intuitive.
It can open and edit Illustrator files if they are pdf compatible, even deal with complex things like knockout groups correctly. It's also has some great ideas that I was pleasantly surprised by that made the workflow better and faster. Affinity devs listen to user feedback and regularly update their apps, so any features that it lacks it will probably get soon.
Lack of a good font manager, it just takes the fonts you have installed in your OS. No Google fonts integration or anything like Adobe Fonts, so if you're missing fonts you have to manually find them online and buy or download them the old-fashioned way. Some odd workflow choices, minor things that can slow you down. Like no native way to permanently reset the bounding box of an object after it has been rotated, they have a toggle that works for 1 operation and switches back to the skewed or rotated original.
The align UI and the order of actions to chose what to align to what is strange and can waste time. Other minor things like that that I ran into, but all in all it works well and gets the job done. An affordable one-time fee for a product that's just as good as illustrator.
Works properly, has all the necessary features and is compatible with other software unlike Inkscape. After using Adobe products for years, I switched to Affinity products.
Initially it was cost driven, but once I tried it I loved it. I was able to open all my Adobe formats, but it all ran faster, and cleaner. It takes patience however! When you're used to the Adobe solutions, you spend quite a bit of time trying to figure out the equal option. However when you do, it is almost always there, and sometimes in a better way! Its quality: I have bought all the software that Affinity offers, I didn't necessarily need it, but I didn't want to miss out!
The software is well designed and created. It is very responsive and fulfills pretty much every need. Compatibility: I appreciate the fact that Affinity software can open so many different formats in their respective areas. Being able to open and edit a PDF in publisher is a breeze.
Support: Support is faultless for me so far. The price: To be able to buy and own the software without a subscription is great. Its price is great when compared to its competition and its functionality matches and exceeds even the largest competitor in my opinion. Complexity: Not really a con, but there are some complex items. The software does provide some very deep options for what you're trying to do.
Once I google how to achieve something its a breeze after that. Not enough products: Its like a delicious chocolate bar, you can never get enough : I look forward to what else this team produces. UX Software. Affinity Designer. Affinity Designer Reviews. Product Overview. Reviews are by default sorted by Recommended to software buyers, driven by our proprietary algorithm reflecting the depth and quality of the review, recency of experience, and other factors.
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From free apps like Inkscape to one time purchase apps like Affinity Designer. Affinity Designer was created by Serif, a software company in the UK. They created a large number of software for Windows in the span of 20 years. What they learned during that time is that software with a heavy load of legacy code was bloated and slow. They decided to create a new suite of desig software that would have little bloat and be faster to use.
Their first project in was Affinity Designer, intended as an alternative to Adobe Illustrator. Now the suite consists of three software programs, Designer, Photo and Publisher. I will give you an overview of the software and some pros and cons towards the end. The most loved aspect of Affinity Designer apart from the one-time-pay system is the Personas toggle.
The value in this toggle is that designers can switch from a vector workspace to a pixel workspace with one click. Designer Persona is the default workspace to create vector graphics. The workspace for the designer persona has tools for drawing shapes and curves, vector brushes, fill and stroke options, transparency controls, and place and crop tools for images.
The Designer Persona is the most similar to Adobe Illustrator. A significant tool in both personas is the Pixel Preview button. This viewing tools instantly shows you how a vector graphic would look as a raster graphic in both normal and retina screens. Pixel Persona is a raster workspace with tools that resemble Photoshop tools. There are different shape marquee tools, a freehand selection tool, artistic pixel brushes, an eraser, a pixel tool which set solitary pixels on the canvas.
Apart from those, there are also photo manipulation tools like dodge, burn, smudge, blur, and sharpen. The brush tool in the Pixel Persona comes with many artistic brush options. Features: Pan and zoom at 60fps. Live previews of transforms in the correct z-order. Real-time gradients, effects, blend modes and adjustments. Always fast, whatever the complexity or size of your artwork. Full Specifications. What's new in version 1. Release March 29, Date Added March 29, Version 1. Operating Systems.
Additional Requirements None. Total Downloads 4, Downloads Last Week Report Software. Related Software. Sweet Home 3D Free.
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