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Affinity Designer: A Love Story

174 points by robenkleene 7y ago

albertop 7y ago
I wish they had a Lightroom replacement. It is the only thing keeping me shackled to Adobe.
- slig 7y ago
  Have you tried ON 1 Photo?
  - albertop 7y ago
    Trying now. Thanks!
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
I've been using Krita a lot as my Photoshop replacement lately, but I bought both Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer and have been impressed with how much they offer for such a significantly more reasonable price. It's time to tell Adobe "no" to subscription based software.
- jiveturkey 7y ago
  adobe has way more and better features. the subscription model is working well for them. that ship has sailed. for people who only need affinity's feature set, it's perfect alternative. but it isn't putting a dent into adobe's revenue. i'm not sure why you care to continue to slam adobe. if affinity's products and sales model suit you, why care what adobe does?
  - egypturnash 7y ago
    I am deep, deep down the Illustrator rabbit hole (20y of it being my main tool, working on big projects that are deeply entwined with how it works) and will not be changing to Affinity Designer, but I can really see Affinity being a lot more appealing to new artists. The subscription model is super off-putting when you’re barely scraping by. Sure Adobe has student pricing but you know what? I wasn’t a student when I glommed onto AI, I was just recently out of school and struggling to get into the animation industry. I pirated it for a while, then started buying it every second or third release when it actually had features that sounded useful to what I was using the program for. Affinity, you pay like, what, fifty bucks, and you’re done. No subscription, no fucking around with cracks. That’s a lot more appealing to someone still learning their craft. I have seen this change happen to Photoshop, there are a lot more young artists who are using Clip Studio or Procreate than Photoshop for their work. I constantly see articles here talking about how UI people are using Figma or Sketch or whatnot instead of AI because they are both better-oriented to what they do and are a lot cheaper, with a buy-once model instead of a subscription. Adobe is also terrible at listening to their users. I can point you to a top-ranked feature request for AI that had its “user story” put into the pipeline to be implemented “soon” something like two years ago, which is a feature I personally was putting into their old feature request inbox a decade ago. Illustrator is really, really ripe for disruption, and Affinity has a solid competitor judging from my brief explorations of it.
    - Kelteseth 7y ago
      Give it a try. I have been using Affinity Designer since 2017 and never looked back. Took me only about a day to learn because it is so similar to Photoshop! I use it mostly for SVG and UI design related stuff for my open source wallpaper app ScreenPlay [1]. [1] https://screen-play.app/ https://screen-play.app/
      - egypturnash 7y ago
        I am thinking I might fuck around with it soon for some standalone art, but I am currently in the middle of a multi-year comics project[1] that pushes Illustrator really hard to produce complex, painterly work at high speed and really don’t feel like changing horses in the middle of a stream would be a good idea. :) [1] http://egypt.urnash.com/parallax/ http://egypt.urnash.com/parallax/
        timtimmy 7y ago
        I find Affinity Designer is way way faster to use than Illustrator. It's not just the rendering, the whole UI is streamlined. However, it's missing many features compared to Illustrator, especially some of the stroke patterns.
        egypturnash 7y ago
        “Missing many features” is certainly not doing a good job selling me on it, after 20y of using and customizing AI I can use it at warp speed, and lean hard on some obscure corners of it!
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      > Affinity, you pay like, what, fifty bucks, and you’re done. It’s currently half off, so you can grab it for 25!
    - PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
      Illustrator is abandonware at this point. What a sorry joke it is. Decade-old defects not fixed. To me the last straw is its lack of a proper selection method (select only objects that are fully enclosed by the marquee, not just touched by it). This glaring deficiency had me running Corel Draw in a VM for years. Now we finally have some newer vector tools on Mac: Designer and Sketch (although Sketch buries the aforementioned selection mode under a hotkey).
  - nnq 7y ago
    > way more and better features That's hyperbole. Affinity products are quite close. Artists with more of a "hacker" mindset who can improvise a bit around missing features can also get by with open-source alternatives like Inkscape and Gimp. Oh, and the new-user friendliness of Adobe products is abismall. I've never seem something more user-hostile than Photoshop - it imposes a brain-breaking mental model copied from the era of dark-room photo-effects or smth. and doesn't accept that everyone wants vector + raster in the same one software. If the industry would not be so high-pressure and artists would have time to learn more tools and play with stuff instead of crunching to meet deadlines, stockholm-syndrome-software like Adobe's would die off... it only survives because that +10% productivity + extra 15% productivity for using the same tool as all the others and all the examples give overwhelmed and overworked artists an extra 25% they can't say no to!
    - mattkrause 7y ago
      The one thing I really miss from Illustrator is “Select Same Appearance”. It doesn’t seem like it’d be that hard to implement, but it’s been “coming soon” for five years.
    - knolan 7y ago
      I learned to love Photoshop and Illustrator after watching a lot of excellent training videos back in the day. I held it up against appallingly bad CAD software like a SolidWorks and Pro/Engineer. Adobe’s apps are utopia in comparison to the hot mess of parametric CAD. Then I learned Blender and nothing comes close for speed and efficiency, except maybe Vim.
    - PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
      Amen. The Photoshop UI is a mess. But... although I eagerly bought Designer when it came out (because Illustrator is basically dead), its UI isn't much better. And I consider that less forgivable in a new product.
    - jiveturkey 7y ago
      > Affinity products are quite close. They aren't. Just look in this thread for many many examples. One thing I didn't see mentioned was scripts. If they were, Adobe would be scrambling. There isn't this grey line where one tool can do the same things but in some different way. There is a sharp line where the cheap tool can't do it at all. You're comparing excel to google sheets. UX enrages aside, the only thing not to like about illustrator is the cost. I also hate that you can't get a nice car for under $50k. That doesn't make the $50k and up cars an object of hate.
- achow 7y ago
  I was always surprised by Adobe's lack of product thinking and software development chops and their revenue and share price (inversely proportional). All of their products never evolved, very poorly integrated, terrible UX and product design in general, bad software development maturity. The last one is an educated guess based upon all of the previous points and also Steve Jobs publicly shaming them due to Adobe's inability to react on Flash issues. [1] Adobe took very long time to react to Sketch software challenge, and the result (Adobe XD)is just about OK, nothing remarkable. [1] Steve Jobs' open letter: Thoughts on Flash https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
  - Marazan 7y ago
    Thoughts on Flash is filed with lies. It opens with lies and continues with lies. Apple denied Abobe access to APIs they needed to make Flash run better on Macs
    - applecrazy 7y ago
      Source?
    - inapis 7y ago
      Adobe has access to plenty of APIs on Windows, yet it didn’t run any better and was an incessant security nightmare. Why would anyone have a reason to believe that Adobe would’ve done a better job on the mac than much flexible windows? Adobe’s current performance on Windows and Mac in 2020 does not add any backing to that argument either.
      - Marazan 7y ago
        Flash ran massively better on Windows than on Macs. One of Job's specific complaints was that it didn't run as well on Mac as it did on Windows. And that's because they couldn't get the same graphics hardware access they could get on Windows. The flash player was a perfectly performany piece of software. The piece of shit programs people wrote for it were slow but that was not inherent of Flash. The same people went on to wrote piece of shit HTML 5 apps that peg out your fan just as much.
- apozem 7y ago
  This is an unpopular take, but for certain kinds of programs, I actually prefer subscription software. All software is a sandcastle build on top of a thousand other sandcastles. It takes active maintenance, especially if it's a professional-grade tool. Subscriptions are the best way to ensure active, responsive product development. They align the developer's incentive (keep paying me) with your incentive (keep my tool working). You wouldn't pay a contractor everything up front to renovate your bathroom. You'd pay as you go to ensure the work continues and is of good quality. Same thing with software.
  - jolux 7y ago
    You do get to keep the product at the end though. And then you’ll typically pay someone else again 20 years down the line to fix different problems, or do different things, etc. Much closer to the old Creative Suite model than CC is. (the latter is also just dreadful software that I dread installing to use Adobe products, which I feel a need to bring up every time I think of it because of how awful it is)
  - wwweston 7y ago
    Sometimes I think the optimal subscription model isn't to pay for additions to software but to maintenance for a stable environment/OS/API set. Like, I've long since failed to get excited about upgrades to macOS, but I might well pay Apple some yearly double digit number to keep snow leopard stable as long as I have hardware that runs back that far. That way, nobody's software rots out from under them, there's always the environment they first brought it to as long as there are enough people to pay the subscription.
leeoniya 7y ago
the quality and value of both Designer & Photo is exceptional. I got a personal license for both and a 5-pack for work. Not being bound to a SaaS/subscription model was key. one thing that's odd is that you cannot export to bmp. it's been requested on their forums but continues to be strangely absent.
c0nsumer 7y ago
I'm really liking Affinity Designer whenever I've tried it; it does pretty much everything that I use Illustrator for. I just wish it could properly injest .AI files. It opens them, but only does things with the PDF header part, resulting in a loss of all groupings. Things like long vectors (think trail routes on a hike/bike trail map) become split into LOTS of little pieces. Affinity Designer is great if you're starting and sticking in it, but moving complex Illustrator docs into it kinda falls apart. :(
- PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
  What if you export your Illustrator files to SVG? Just an idea.
- slantyyz 7y ago
  > I just wish it could properly injest .AI files. For me, it's the only non-Illustrator app that I tried that didn't mangle them too much (visually speaking). I had tried so many free and non-free (but inexpensive) apps on Mac and Windows that would have so many problems with .ai files. Once I would load them into an app, the would look nothing like I expected them to. My use case for .ai files is usually to simply convert them to svg or emf to be able to insert them into documents. Thankfully I didn't have a need to edit them, because it sounds a little nightmarish from your experience.
  - c0nsumer 7y ago
    That's very true and a good point. It does load them fine, and they are usable. Just... Not good for editing. For a specific example, check out this: http://www.cramba.org/storage/maps/pontiaclake/CRAMBA_Pontiac_Lake_17-Jun-2014.pdf http://www.cramba.org/storage/maps/pontiaclake/CRAMBA_Pontia... In the original .AI the main mountain bike trail loop is a single path. Makes it nice and easy to work on. Bring it into Designer and I think it became dozens of really small ones? I'd really like to move to a Designer workflow because AI is so expensive for the no-pay volunteer work that I do making these maps, but the up-front work of that would be tremendous. So for now... I just can't.
kyrra 7y ago
My friend was selling me on affinity recently. They have a 50% off sale going on with their products right now, and they have 90 day demos to try it. Definitely will have a learning curve for someone that has only used paint.net, but will be nice when I need to do the occasion graphics work for personal projects.
AmVess 7y ago
I switched to Affinity Photo a while ago. It took a little while to get used to it, but I don't miss PS at all now. Granted, I'm not a professional photog, but I've been using PS since it was released. I also have Designer, and it is quite good...although I don't know enough about Illustrator to be able to compare them. Adobe has gotten lazy and sloppy. The CC launcher/updater frequently needs to be reinstalled, and PS is slow in quite a few areas. Simple batch resizing photos in PS is a real chore because it only uses a single core. Affinity uses all of them, and the performance difference is pretty stark. Affinity frequently updates their products with new features. I purchased this product a few years ago and haven't been charged for new releases. Affinity allows 5 one serial to be installed on 5 machines. All of their products are for sale for 50% off.
- slantyyz 7y ago
  I have Affinity Photo, but I find I don't even use Photo for photos at all. It's usually for manipulating non-photo raster stuff for the web. For photos, I pretty much use DxO (Lightroom equivalent) exclusively. I have found Lightroom equivalents to have just the right amount of Photoshop functionality that a) lets me do everything I need faster than a dedicated Photoshop type app, b) lets me do that stuff in batches faster.
guitarbill 7y ago
after struggling with inkscape for way too long. finally, i downloaded the affinity designer demo, and actually got stuff done. it isn't perfect, splitting/deleting parts of a curve was trickier than illustrator. but overall, very happy. i'm a convert.
saagarjha 7y ago
I didn’t even know Affinity had a student discount. I’m not even a graphics designer and I have it for I have it for all my devices. It’s great to not have to pay a subscription just to tinker around with Photoshop-level tools, and I am very glad that it exists and is so high-quality.
dr_kiszonka 7y ago
I quite like Affinity too, but have a small gripe with the company. While they have free online tutorials, they also sell "workbooks" for their software, which seem to be beautiful manuals. Why are users expected to pay for manuals? Shouldn't their PDFs be free downloads? More generally, why do many tech companies charge for training in using their products? For instance, Google has GCP courses on Coursera, but you have to pay $49 month to access labs. I don't see this practice with physical goods, but we seem to accept with software.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  > Why are users expected to pay for manuals? ...why shouldn't they? They take extra time/money to create, and not all users will necessarily need them. If a third party wrote a book on Affinity and charged for it, we wouldn't bat an eye. Shouldn't the developer get the same privilege?
  - PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
    Manuals and books are different things. Nobody should be expected to pay for a manual; that's part of the product. An advanced book? Sure. Look at Resolve: It has an EXTENSIVE (and pretty decent) manual, which costs nothing... and for most users, neither does the product.
    - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      As GP mentioned, Serif offers free online tutorials. It's just that they also sell additional "workbooks".
- x3haloed 7y ago
  Because the software is super cheap. Affinity sells perpetual licenses at a fraction of what Adobe charges. They need additional income sources. Makes sense to me. Why not break up the pricing to pay for only what you need?
- g_p 7y ago
  Serif also produces free online manuals, in addition to the workbooks: https://affinity.help/photo/en-US.lproj/index.html https://affinity.help/photo/en-US.lproj/index.html (Photo) https://affinity.help/designer/en-US.lproj/index.html https://affinity.help/designer/en-US.lproj/index.html (Designer) https://affinity.help/publisher/en-US.lproj/index.html https://affinity.help/publisher/en-US.lproj/index.html (Publisher) Might be of use to anyone wanting to learn more about the products by way of the old-fashioned reading of the manual!
seanwilson 7y ago
I moved from Inkscape to Affinity Designer. The interface for Affinity Designer is orders of magnitude better but I do like that Inkscape lets you load + save to SVG files instead of being geared towards a proprietary forward. However, after a while, I kept finding when I would Google "how to X in Affinity Designer" and find a feature I thought was obvious was missing with no plans to implement it. I ended up switching to Sketch and it's orders of magnitude again better for me. I primarily draw icons, logos and interface mockups. Sketch gives you lots of ways for quickly iterating over lots of mockups that I couldn't find in Affinity Designer so I'm much happier now. Either way, they're both good for different use cases and both have free trials. I'm considering Figma now because I don't like being tied to using a Mac and want something that might work on a Chromebook. You can run Inkscape on Chromebooks now but I'm pretty sure sure I can't go back to the interface. Are there any alternatives I haven't considered?
- asfarley 7y ago
  Yes! I ran into exactly the same thing with Inkscape, aftering purchasing Affinity thinking that it was going to be the 'pro' version of Inkscape. Now I'm regularly going back to Inkscape for features that Affinity doesn't consider to be important: 1) Auto-trace (come on - I could write this myself, not implemented yet?) 2) Provide option to preserve aspect-ratio in exported SVGs Makes me wonder whether it's worth the continued investment in learning. Also, I am not sure 'personas' is the best choice. After trying both, I somewhat prefer Inkscape's single UI which balances the needs of any sort of editing. I find it quite jarring to go looking for a control for 10 seconds until I realize I'm in the wrong persona. Maybe I just need more practice though.
  - drwu 7y ago
    3) Gradient mesh fill 4) Flexible guide lines for free 3D perspective drawing 5) Things are rasterized, which are for sure supported in SVG or PDF (well done, inkscape) 6) (optional) TeX export
- RBerenguel 7y ago
  I remember being a super satisfied user of Sketch many years ago, and was then burned with the amount of bugs when they moved from version 2 to 3 (if my memory serves). I actually bought Affinity Designer then, on the spot (again, if memory serves that was 7 years ago or so). So far for my low-level use case it has been excellent, and have eventually added the full suite (Photo, Publisher, Designer) to my computer (or my partner's). I no longer need to edit complex things, so Affinity is a great tool. Although Inkscape has its place still, as a "just in case SVG editor".
open-source-ux 7y ago
It's worth noting that the Affinity apps are available for both Mac and Windows (in contrast to some Mac-only design tools like Sketch). Overall, I find the UI of the Affinity apps to be...OK. Some tasks feels a bit clunky (but less clunky than Adobe apps). I still recommend the Affinity apps if you are looking for alternatives to Illustrator, Photoshop, or InDesign. But be aware that the Affinity apps are not identical in features to Adobe's apps. The Affinity website has a good showcase of how people are using their apps: https://affinityspotlight.com/ https://affinityspotlight.com/ It's also nice to see some competition against the behemoth that is Adobe. In particular, these smaller, more nimble competitors (Sketch, Affinity, Figma, Procreate) have shown that you don't always have to beat the dominant company in a market, just carve out enough space in the same market to succeed.
xs 7y ago
Been using Affinity Photo for a year now. I love it. I feel confident with the tool and can make some pretty cool things. No other tool has made me feel that way. I've spent 10 years on and off using gimp and photoshop. Never could get it. I tried Krita and Pixlr. They were buggy and had shortcomings. Affinity Photo has a great price and absolutely rocks. One thing I still think is clunky though is the Color Picker Tool. I have to select my paint brush, then click and drag the color picker to the color I want, then click the color I want again to get it on my paint brush. I think other tools simply let me hold alt+click on the color to get that color on my brush. But Affinity is like a 5 step deal which slows me down a lot.
- brianpgordon 7y ago
  I'm a Photo (and Designer) user too, just for casual use. The only features I really miss from GIMP are animated gif editing, a "crop to selection" function, and to a lesser extent a click-and-drag perspective transform. The Affinity forums have helpful information for working around missing features, but it seems like some people there have a weirdly defensive attitude about how there are good reasons for every missing thing... Designer was a bigger win for me because I've always found the Inkscape UI baffling.
  - PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
    Agree on the defensive attitude of the forums AND, occasionally, the developers. Not that this is specific to Affinity; Adobe apologists are some of the Web's most obnoxious... far worse than Affinity's. The eyedropper function is BACKWARD from every other one I've used. You click on the eyedropper, and suddenly the color of the current object changes... but you haven't even sampled a color yet. To sample a color, you don't click on the eyedropper... you click on a dot next to it, and drag that onto a color. Then, the next time you select an object and open the Fill panel... the color you just sampled is gone. Another WTF. The lack of cropping is baffling. I asked for this too. This is a version 1.0 feature. Also... inability to change the background color. What if I want to see what my design looks like against various backgrounds? What if I'm printing on colored paper? You're stuck making a big-ass rectangle under your drawing and filling it with a color, then remembering to hide it or disable it if you print. LAME.
PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
Illustrator is abandonware at this point. Defective and basically unmaintained by Adobe. Too bad they don't just open-source it. Designer is decent and probably the best vector option on Mac, but it suffers from some pretty bad UI. Tools' settings are scattered all over the place, with properties of objects sometimes being mixed in with tools in the tools palette. Properties for objects are often nonsensically enabled, either because no object is selected or the property is inapplicable. This issue comes down to poor UI validation. Affinity doesn't appear to be particularly interested in addressing some reasonably significant gaffes, either. If you look at their Fill functionality you'll see examples of all of this.
juliend2 7y ago
I used to design for print media as well as for web, and I can say that Affinity Designer does both really well. So it's more than just an Adobe XD, Sketch or Figma replacement (web UI design). For more than a year now, I no longer need to use my old Illustrator license that I bought just before Adobe went cloud-only. Really impressed. And it's going to be a no-brainer for me to get an Affinity Publisher license as well, when I'll need to do multi-page print documents.
kmfrk 7y ago
I love it too, but I find it a little weird I need the Photo app to use the magic "remove object" tool. Otherwise Designer seems to have everything I want.
gtm1260 7y ago
The value of being able to collaborate and share on the web in Figma has outweighed any feature of almost any other graphics editor.
mortenjorck 7y ago
Affinity Designer is an excellent piece of professional creative software, but Serif’s business model is broken. They’ve erred on the other end of the spectrum from Adobe. Rather than get greedy and force users into renting their software as Adobe has, they’ve tried to stretch out a very low price of entry into a multi-year series of free updates – and it’s not working. I paid a mere $50 for Affinity Designer half a decade ago. While it’s seen some valuable updates since then, the core promise of an Illustrator killer remains out of reach: Key features like blends, pattern brushes, distortion envelopes, and more have sat on the 1.x roadmap for years, and the marquee feature of 1.8, released a few weeks ago, was a years-in-the-making bugfix for the expand stroke feature. I want to give Serif more money so they can bring Designer up to speed with Illustrator, as fifty dollars every 5+ years clearly doesn’t support the kind of development effort this requires. I don’t want to subscribe to Designer either, but there are other proven models: Look at Sketch, which has an optional, annual upgrade program, and has shipped vastly more functionality than Designer has in the same time period. My criticism isn’t entirely fair as Serif has also been occupied with launching Photo and Publisher during this time, but there’s no escaping the conclusion that Designer has stagnated. I really hope the company finds the right course correction that keeps the Affinity range affordable while sustainably funding development.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  I tend to agree. Development for Photo also has slowed down after a burst of new features after release. I am definitely wondering how they are doing financially.
  - sbuk 7y ago
    I know that they’ve been focussed on getting Publisher out. Whether that is the reason for any slowdown isn’t clear.
- jstummbillig 7y ago
  Don't look too hard at Sketch. While they have been the first movers on what was (and to a lesser extend still is) a glaring gap in the designers toolkit, Figma has been clawing market share at lightning speed over the last 2 years. Sketch has delivered on a lot of things, but I do not think their business model is root cause of their success.
pier25 7y ago
I love Photo but the lack of group isolation in Designer is a total deal breaker for me. Working with groups is still a nightmare even after years of demands by users for this feature. See this thread started in 2014: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/1640-ad-isolation-mode/ https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/1640-ad-is...
jimbobimbo 7y ago
I'm Paint Shop Pro refugee. I started using PSP back when it was developed by Jasc. Then I bought several versions of Corel's iteration of PSP, but the quality went down quite noticeably. Affinity series is awesome. I bought their Photo last year, and today - they're running a sale - got the Designer. Very nice product!
k__ 7y ago
I'm using Gravit Designer and Photpea for a few years now. They're free and run in the browser. But I'm not doing much design work. Just shirt and badges.
uxcolumbo 7y ago
I'm an ex Photoshop user - stopped using it when they moved to a subscription model. I'm an ex Sketch user, because I moved back to Windows (feel that Apple is ripping users off and I can get better choice, quality and performance elsewhere. I don't need shiny and thin and $20 cables that break often). I like Figma - amazing what the engineering team achieved there. But it's primarily an online app and I'm worried they might get acquired by some of the bigger companies. I'm now using Affinity Designer and Photo. It does most of the things I need. It has some minor UX annoyances (or maybe my Photoshop muscle memory is not fully overwritten yet). Maybe I'm one of the dying breed that prefers to have a native app with a perpetual license and the option to choose when to upgrade and being more in control. I'm not sure whether it's sustainable for Serif to charge $49 for an app. I'd be happy to pay more if it meant they could work on those other things mentioned here by others. EDIT: typos
mattkevan 7y ago
Affinity Publisher is great too. If you have the other apps, being able to edit assets by instantly switching into Designer or Photo mode and having access to all the relevant tools is amazing. Saves so much time round-tripping between apps. Amazed Adobe hadn’t done something similar a long time ago.
bowbe 7y ago
Any Sketch-to-Designer converts here that could recommend the switch? I've been using an old standalone license of Sketch and refuse to upgrade to their subscription model. Things you like, things you miss, etc.
- PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
  I don't use Sketch a lot, but I like being able to set up a one-button export that spits out multiple versions. You may very well be able to do this in Designer, but I don't use their "persona" concept. Sketch suffers from some profound selection problems. It inexplicably treats all objects as filled... but only when you drag within them (but not when you click). So if you want to select a bunch of smaller objects that reside within the boundaries of a bigger one, NOPE: You'll end up moving the enclosing object when you try to drag a selection marquee around the enclosed objects. That's a deal-breaker for me. I mean... WTF. Another selection-oriented quibble in Sketch is that you can't set the default selection mode to "select only objects that are fully enclosed by the selection marquee." This is only available if you press and hold a hotkey while selecting. But that's miles ahead of Illustrator, which totally lacks this critical selection mode... a product-killer in my book. Designer offers this mode up-front as a full-time default, as does Corel Draw (which defaults to it). Inkscape has it also. I don't know how people tolerate its absence.
ilmiont 7y ago
I used Affinity Designer as my only design tool for about a year (UI design) from late 2017. I liked it overall and I liked what Serif has built it around it, even going so far as to offer printed documentation (the Workbooks) and the beautiful Affinity Spotlight website which is a really wonderful website unto itself. And there was the obvious benefit of the low cost and perpetual license. The featureset was adequate for me and the interface initially won me over. But I ended up moving away for two main reasons: 1. It tended to feel sluggish as hell. 2. Frequent crashes in the middle of work. 3. Lacking basic productivity capabilities, e.g. no ability to interact with the layers pane (rename, reorder etc.) using the keyboard shortcuts. I was running it on an i7-7700k with GTX 1080 Ti and yet there was often a perceptible delay between clicking something and the action occurring. Even expanding layers in the layer pane, or double clicking a text field... there was a very small but perceptible delay. More serious though was (3) especially combined with (1)... little things like tidying up file layers were vastly more time consuming than they should have been. I was suggested to try Figma and have never looked back. It has keyboard shortcuts for everything and all interactions feel instantaneous... even though it runs within the browser! The first time I used it I was astounded and then made the switch within weeks. Haven’t run Affinity in over 18 months and it would take a lot for me to try it again. I now run a Linux desktop anyway so not really even an option...
seangp 7y ago
I love the affinity suite. Our entire studio has switched from Adobe to Affinity and we haven’t looked back - we’re very happy. Latest version of photo supports smart objects so we can now use PSD mockup templates which was the one thing we really missed in the previous version. We do use Sketch for UI work but they have really been dropping the ball lately. We’re now running several versions behind in Sketch because of all the bugs and poor UI choices. Might even switch to Affinity designer for all our UI in the near future.
jvns 7y ago
I've been really impressed with Affinity Designer's features but I've had a lot of problems with the iPad app. It frequently uses up 100% of my disk space for no apparent reason unless I periodically uninstall and reinstall the app -- I found a lot of people in the Affinity Designer forums complaining about this issue since 2018 but it hasn't been fixed. I ended up having to stop using the iPad app because of the disk space issues and because I kept on losing work because Affinity Designer didn't save reliably.
indymike 7y ago
Affinity Designer, Publisher, and Photo are fantastic. I've been using Adobe, Corel and many open-source design tools, in most cases, since version 1. The UI is so smooth in Affinity that I usually finish work in half the time. Affinity's features set, across all three apps, is plenty good enough for professional use. Compatibility with Adobe and other design software is outstanding.
atesti 7y ago
Is it correct that I can just buy their products and own them? No online activation, no telemetry, no license checks?

174 points by robenkleene 7y ago

albertop 7y ago

I wish they had a Lightroom replacement. It is the only thing keeping me shackled to Adobe.

slig 7y ago
Have you tried ON 1 Photo?
- albertop 7y ago
  Trying now. Thanks!

ocdtrekkie 7y ago

I've been using Krita a lot as my Photoshop replacement lately, but I bought both Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer and have been impressed with how much they offer for such a significantly more reasonable price. It's time to tell Adobe "no" to subscription based software.

jiveturkey 7y ago
adobe has way more and better features. the subscription model is working well for them. that ship has sailed. for people who only need affinity's feature set, it's perfect alternative. but it isn't putting a dent into adobe's revenue. i'm not sure why you care to continue to slam adobe. if affinity's products and sales model suit you, why care what adobe does?
- egypturnash 7y ago
  I am deep, deep down the Illustrator rabbit hole (20y of it being my main tool, working on big projects that are deeply entwined with how it works) and will not be changing to Affinity Designer, but I can really see Affinity being a lot more appealing to new artists. The subscription model is super off-putting when you’re barely scraping by. Sure Adobe has student pricing but you know what? I wasn’t a student when I glommed onto AI, I was just recently out of school and struggling to get into the animation industry. I pirated it for a while, then started buying it every second or third release when it actually had features that sounded useful to what I was using the program for. Affinity, you pay like, what, fifty bucks, and you’re done. No subscription, no fucking around with cracks. That’s a lot more appealing to someone still learning their craft. I have seen this change happen to Photoshop, there are a lot more young artists who are using Clip Studio or Procreate than Photoshop for their work. I constantly see articles here talking about how UI people are using Figma or Sketch or whatnot instead of AI because they are both better-oriented to what they do and are a lot cheaper, with a buy-once model instead of a subscription. Adobe is also terrible at listening to their users. I can point you to a top-ranked feature request for AI that had its “user story” put into the pipeline to be implemented “soon” something like two years ago, which is a feature I personally was putting into their old feature request inbox a decade ago. Illustrator is really, really ripe for disruption, and Affinity has a solid competitor judging from my brief explorations of it.
  - Kelteseth 7y ago
    Give it a try. I have been using Affinity Designer since 2017 and never looked back. Took me only about a day to learn because it is so similar to Photoshop! I use it mostly for SVG and UI design related stuff for my open source wallpaper app ScreenPlay [1]. [1] https://screen-play.app/ https://screen-play.app/
    - egypturnash 7y ago
      I am thinking I might fuck around with it soon for some standalone art, but I am currently in the middle of a multi-year comics project[1] that pushes Illustrator really hard to produce complex, painterly work at high speed and really don’t feel like changing horses in the middle of a stream would be a good idea. :) [1] http://egypt.urnash.com/parallax/ http://egypt.urnash.com/parallax/
      - timtimmy 7y ago
        I find Affinity Designer is way way faster to use than Illustrator. It's not just the rendering, the whole UI is streamlined. However, it's missing many features compared to Illustrator, especially some of the stroke patterns.
        egypturnash 7y ago
        “Missing many features” is certainly not doing a good job selling me on it, after 20y of using and customizing AI I can use it at warp speed, and lean hard on some obscure corners of it!
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > Affinity, you pay like, what, fifty bucks, and you’re done. It’s currently half off, so you can grab it for 25!
  - PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
    Illustrator is abandonware at this point. What a sorry joke it is. Decade-old defects not fixed. To me the last straw is its lack of a proper selection method (select only objects that are fully enclosed by the marquee, not just touched by it). This glaring deficiency had me running Corel Draw in a VM for years. Now we finally have some newer vector tools on Mac: Designer and Sketch (although Sketch buries the aforementioned selection mode under a hotkey).
- nnq 7y ago
  > way more and better features That's hyperbole. Affinity products are quite close. Artists with more of a "hacker" mindset who can improvise a bit around missing features can also get by with open-source alternatives like Inkscape and Gimp. Oh, and the new-user friendliness of Adobe products is abismall. I've never seem something more user-hostile than Photoshop - it imposes a brain-breaking mental model copied from the era of dark-room photo-effects or smth. and doesn't accept that everyone wants vector + raster in the same one software. If the industry would not be so high-pressure and artists would have time to learn more tools and play with stuff instead of crunching to meet deadlines, stockholm-syndrome-software like Adobe's would die off... it only survives because that +10% productivity + extra 15% productivity for using the same tool as all the others and all the examples give overwhelmed and overworked artists an extra 25% they can't say no to!
  - mattkrause 7y ago
    The one thing I really miss from Illustrator is “Select Same Appearance”. It doesn’t seem like it’d be that hard to implement, but it’s been “coming soon” for five years.
  - knolan 7y ago
    I learned to love Photoshop and Illustrator after watching a lot of excellent training videos back in the day. I held it up against appallingly bad CAD software like a SolidWorks and Pro/Engineer. Adobe’s apps are utopia in comparison to the hot mess of parametric CAD. Then I learned Blender and nothing comes close for speed and efficiency, except maybe Vim.
  - PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
    Amen. The Photoshop UI is a mess. But... although I eagerly bought Designer when it came out (because Illustrator is basically dead), its UI isn't much better. And I consider that less forgivable in a new product.
  - jiveturkey 7y ago
    > Affinity products are quite close. They aren't. Just look in this thread for many many examples. One thing I didn't see mentioned was scripts. If they were, Adobe would be scrambling. There isn't this grey line where one tool can do the same things but in some different way. There is a sharp line where the cheap tool can't do it at all. You're comparing excel to google sheets. UX enrages aside, the only thing not to like about illustrator is the cost. I also hate that you can't get a nice car for under $50k. That doesn't make the $50k and up cars an object of hate.
achow 7y ago
I was always surprised by Adobe's lack of product thinking and software development chops and their revenue and share price (inversely proportional). All of their products never evolved, very poorly integrated, terrible UX and product design in general, bad software development maturity. The last one is an educated guess based upon all of the previous points and also Steve Jobs publicly shaming them due to Adobe's inability to react on Flash issues. [1] Adobe took very long time to react to Sketch software challenge, and the result (Adobe XD)is just about OK, nothing remarkable. [1] Steve Jobs' open letter: Thoughts on Flash https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
- Marazan 7y ago
  Thoughts on Flash is filed with lies. It opens with lies and continues with lies. Apple denied Abobe access to APIs they needed to make Flash run better on Macs
  - applecrazy 7y ago
    Source?
  - inapis 7y ago
    Adobe has access to plenty of APIs on Windows, yet it didn’t run any better and was an incessant security nightmare. Why would anyone have a reason to believe that Adobe would’ve done a better job on the mac than much flexible windows? Adobe’s current performance on Windows and Mac in 2020 does not add any backing to that argument either.
    - Marazan 7y ago
      Flash ran massively better on Windows than on Macs. One of Job's specific complaints was that it didn't run as well on Mac as it did on Windows. And that's because they couldn't get the same graphics hardware access they could get on Windows. The flash player was a perfectly performany piece of software. The piece of shit programs people wrote for it were slow but that was not inherent of Flash. The same people went on to wrote piece of shit HTML 5 apps that peg out your fan just as much.
apozem 7y ago
This is an unpopular take, but for certain kinds of programs, I actually prefer subscription software. All software is a sandcastle build on top of a thousand other sandcastles. It takes active maintenance, especially if it's a professional-grade tool. Subscriptions are the best way to ensure active, responsive product development. They align the developer's incentive (keep paying me) with your incentive (keep my tool working). You wouldn't pay a contractor everything up front to renovate your bathroom. You'd pay as you go to ensure the work continues and is of good quality. Same thing with software.
- jolux 7y ago
  You do get to keep the product at the end though. And then you’ll typically pay someone else again 20 years down the line to fix different problems, or do different things, etc. Much closer to the old Creative Suite model than CC is. (the latter is also just dreadful software that I dread installing to use Adobe products, which I feel a need to bring up every time I think of it because of how awful it is)
- wwweston 7y ago
  Sometimes I think the optimal subscription model isn't to pay for additions to software but to maintenance for a stable environment/OS/API set. Like, I've long since failed to get excited about upgrades to macOS, but I might well pay Apple some yearly double digit number to keep snow leopard stable as long as I have hardware that runs back that far. That way, nobody's software rots out from under them, there's always the environment they first brought it to as long as there are enough people to pay the subscription.

leeoniya 7y ago

the quality and value of both Designer & Photo is exceptional. I got a personal license for both and a 5-pack for work. Not being bound to a SaaS/subscription model was key. one thing that's odd is that you cannot export to bmp. it's been requested on their forums but continues to be strangely absent.

c0nsumer 7y ago

I'm really liking Affinity Designer whenever I've tried it; it does pretty much everything that I use Illustrator for. I just wish it could properly injest .AI files. It opens them, but only does things with the PDF header part, resulting in a loss of all groupings. Things like long vectors (think trail routes on a hike/bike trail map) become split into LOTS of little pieces. Affinity Designer is great if you're starting and sticking in it, but moving complex Illustrator docs into it kinda falls apart. :(

PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
What if you export your Illustrator files to SVG? Just an idea.
slantyyz 7y ago
> I just wish it could properly injest .AI files. For me, it's the only non-Illustrator app that I tried that didn't mangle them too much (visually speaking). I had tried so many free and non-free (but inexpensive) apps on Mac and Windows that would have so many problems with .ai files. Once I would load them into an app, the would look nothing like I expected them to. My use case for .ai files is usually to simply convert them to svg or emf to be able to insert them into documents. Thankfully I didn't have a need to edit them, because it sounds a little nightmarish from your experience.
- c0nsumer 7y ago
  That's very true and a good point. It does load them fine, and they are usable. Just... Not good for editing. For a specific example, check out this: http://www.cramba.org/storage/maps/pontiaclake/CRAMBA_Pontiac_Lake_17-Jun-2014.pdf http://www.cramba.org/storage/maps/pontiaclake/CRAMBA_Pontia... In the original .AI the main mountain bike trail loop is a single path. Makes it nice and easy to work on. Bring it into Designer and I think it became dozens of really small ones? I'd really like to move to a Designer workflow because AI is so expensive for the no-pay volunteer work that I do making these maps, but the up-front work of that would be tremendous. So for now... I just can't.

kyrra 7y ago

My friend was selling me on affinity recently. They have a 50% off sale going on with their products right now, and they have 90 day demos to try it. Definitely will have a learning curve for someone that has only used paint.net, but will be nice when I need to do the occasion graphics work for personal projects.

AmVess 7y ago

I switched to Affinity Photo a while ago. It took a little while to get used to it, but I don't miss PS at all now. Granted, I'm not a professional photog, but I've been using PS since it was released. I also have Designer, and it is quite good...although I don't know enough about Illustrator to be able to compare them. Adobe has gotten lazy and sloppy. The CC launcher/updater frequently needs to be reinstalled, and PS is slow in quite a few areas. Simple batch resizing photos in PS is a real chore because it only uses a single core. Affinity uses all of them, and the performance difference is pretty stark. Affinity frequently updates their products with new features. I purchased this product a few years ago and haven't been charged for new releases. Affinity allows 5 one serial to be installed on 5 machines. All of their products are for sale for 50% off.

slantyyz 7y ago
I have Affinity Photo, but I find I don't even use Photo for photos at all. It's usually for manipulating non-photo raster stuff for the web. For photos, I pretty much use DxO (Lightroom equivalent) exclusively. I have found Lightroom equivalents to have just the right amount of Photoshop functionality that a) lets me do everything I need faster than a dedicated Photoshop type app, b) lets me do that stuff in batches faster.

guitarbill 7y ago

after struggling with inkscape for way too long. finally, i downloaded the affinity designer demo, and actually got stuff done. it isn't perfect, splitting/deleting parts of a curve was trickier than illustrator. but overall, very happy. i'm a convert.

saagarjha 7y ago

I didn’t even know Affinity had a student discount. I’m not even a graphics designer and I have it for I have it for all my devices. It’s great to not have to pay a subscription just to tinker around with Photoshop-level tools, and I am very glad that it exists and is so high-quality.

dr_kiszonka 7y ago

I quite like Affinity too, but have a small gripe with the company. While they have free online tutorials, they also sell "workbooks" for their software, which seem to be beautiful manuals. Why are users expected to pay for manuals? Shouldn't their PDFs be free downloads? More generally, why do many tech companies charge for training in using their products? For instance, Google has GCP courses on Coursera, but you have to pay $49 month to access labs. I don't see this practice with physical goods, but we seem to accept with software.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
> Why are users expected to pay for manuals? ...why shouldn't they? They take extra time/money to create, and not all users will necessarily need them. If a third party wrote a book on Affinity and charged for it, we wouldn't bat an eye. Shouldn't the developer get the same privilege?
- PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
  Manuals and books are different things. Nobody should be expected to pay for a manual; that's part of the product. An advanced book? Sure. Look at Resolve: It has an EXTENSIVE (and pretty decent) manual, which costs nothing... and for most users, neither does the product.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    As GP mentioned, Serif offers free online tutorials. It's just that they also sell additional "workbooks".
x3haloed 7y ago
Because the software is super cheap. Affinity sells perpetual licenses at a fraction of what Adobe charges. They need additional income sources. Makes sense to me. Why not break up the pricing to pay for only what you need?
g_p 7y ago
Serif also produces free online manuals, in addition to the workbooks: https://affinity.help/photo/en-US.lproj/index.html https://affinity.help/photo/en-US.lproj/index.html (Photo) https://affinity.help/designer/en-US.lproj/index.html https://affinity.help/designer/en-US.lproj/index.html (Designer) https://affinity.help/publisher/en-US.lproj/index.html https://affinity.help/publisher/en-US.lproj/index.html (Publisher) Might be of use to anyone wanting to learn more about the products by way of the old-fashioned reading of the manual!

seanwilson 7y ago

I moved from Inkscape to Affinity Designer. The interface for Affinity Designer is orders of magnitude better but I do like that Inkscape lets you load + save to SVG files instead of being geared towards a proprietary forward. However, after a while, I kept finding when I would Google "how to X in Affinity Designer" and find a feature I thought was obvious was missing with no plans to implement it. I ended up switching to Sketch and it's orders of magnitude again better for me. I primarily draw icons, logos and interface mockups. Sketch gives you lots of ways for quickly iterating over lots of mockups that I couldn't find in Affinity Designer so I'm much happier now. Either way, they're both good for different use cases and both have free trials. I'm considering Figma now because I don't like being tied to using a Mac and want something that might work on a Chromebook. You can run Inkscape on Chromebooks now but I'm pretty sure sure I can't go back to the interface. Are there any alternatives I haven't considered?

asfarley 7y ago
Yes! I ran into exactly the same thing with Inkscape, aftering purchasing Affinity thinking that it was going to be the 'pro' version of Inkscape. Now I'm regularly going back to Inkscape for features that Affinity doesn't consider to be important: 1) Auto-trace (come on - I could write this myself, not implemented yet?) 2) Provide option to preserve aspect-ratio in exported SVGs Makes me wonder whether it's worth the continued investment in learning. Also, I am not sure 'personas' is the best choice. After trying both, I somewhat prefer Inkscape's single UI which balances the needs of any sort of editing. I find it quite jarring to go looking for a control for 10 seconds until I realize I'm in the wrong persona. Maybe I just need more practice though.
- drwu 7y ago
  3) Gradient mesh fill 4) Flexible guide lines for free 3D perspective drawing 5) Things are rasterized, which are for sure supported in SVG or PDF (well done, inkscape) 6) (optional) TeX export
RBerenguel 7y ago
I remember being a super satisfied user of Sketch many years ago, and was then burned with the amount of bugs when they moved from version 2 to 3 (if my memory serves). I actually bought Affinity Designer then, on the spot (again, if memory serves that was 7 years ago or so). So far for my low-level use case it has been excellent, and have eventually added the full suite (Photo, Publisher, Designer) to my computer (or my partner's). I no longer need to edit complex things, so Affinity is a great tool. Although Inkscape has its place still, as a "just in case SVG editor".

open-source-ux 7y ago

It's worth noting that the Affinity apps are available for both Mac and Windows (in contrast to some Mac-only design tools like Sketch). Overall, I find the UI of the Affinity apps to be...OK. Some tasks feels a bit clunky (but less clunky than Adobe apps). I still recommend the Affinity apps if you are looking for alternatives to Illustrator, Photoshop, or InDesign. But be aware that the Affinity apps are not identical in features to Adobe's apps. The Affinity website has a good showcase of how people are using their apps: https://affinityspotlight.com/ https://affinityspotlight.com/ It's also nice to see some competition against the behemoth that is Adobe. In particular, these smaller, more nimble competitors (Sketch, Affinity, Figma, Procreate) have shown that you don't always have to beat the dominant company in a market, just carve out enough space in the same market to succeed.

xs 7y ago

Been using Affinity Photo for a year now. I love it. I feel confident with the tool and can make some pretty cool things. No other tool has made me feel that way. I've spent 10 years on and off using gimp and photoshop. Never could get it. I tried Krita and Pixlr. They were buggy and had shortcomings. Affinity Photo has a great price and absolutely rocks. One thing I still think is clunky though is the Color Picker Tool. I have to select my paint brush, then click and drag the color picker to the color I want, then click the color I want again to get it on my paint brush. I think other tools simply let me hold alt+click on the color to get that color on my brush. But Affinity is like a 5 step deal which slows me down a lot.

brianpgordon 7y ago
I'm a Photo (and Designer) user too, just for casual use. The only features I really miss from GIMP are animated gif editing, a "crop to selection" function, and to a lesser extent a click-and-drag perspective transform. The Affinity forums have helpful information for working around missing features, but it seems like some people there have a weirdly defensive attitude about how there are good reasons for every missing thing... Designer was a bigger win for me because I've always found the Inkscape UI baffling.
- PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
  Agree on the defensive attitude of the forums AND, occasionally, the developers. Not that this is specific to Affinity; Adobe apologists are some of the Web's most obnoxious... far worse than Affinity's. The eyedropper function is BACKWARD from every other one I've used. You click on the eyedropper, and suddenly the color of the current object changes... but you haven't even sampled a color yet. To sample a color, you don't click on the eyedropper... you click on a dot next to it, and drag that onto a color. Then, the next time you select an object and open the Fill panel... the color you just sampled is gone. Another WTF. The lack of cropping is baffling. I asked for this too. This is a version 1.0 feature. Also... inability to change the background color. What if I want to see what my design looks like against various backgrounds? What if I'm printing on colored paper? You're stuck making a big-ass rectangle under your drawing and filling it with a color, then remembering to hide it or disable it if you print. LAME.

PunksATawnyFill 7y ago

Illustrator is abandonware at this point. Defective and basically unmaintained by Adobe. Too bad they don't just open-source it. Designer is decent and probably the best vector option on Mac, but it suffers from some pretty bad UI. Tools' settings are scattered all over the place, with properties of objects sometimes being mixed in with tools in the tools palette. Properties for objects are often nonsensically enabled, either because no object is selected or the property is inapplicable. This issue comes down to poor UI validation. Affinity doesn't appear to be particularly interested in addressing some reasonably significant gaffes, either. If you look at their Fill functionality you'll see examples of all of this.

juliend2 7y ago

I used to design for print media as well as for web, and I can say that Affinity Designer does both really well. So it's more than just an Adobe XD, Sketch or Figma replacement (web UI design). For more than a year now, I no longer need to use my old Illustrator license that I bought just before Adobe went cloud-only. Really impressed. And it's going to be a no-brainer for me to get an Affinity Publisher license as well, when I'll need to do multi-page print documents.

kmfrk 7y ago

I love it too, but I find it a little weird I need the Photo app to use the magic "remove object" tool. Otherwise Designer seems to have everything I want.

gtm1260 7y ago

The value of being able to collaborate and share on the web in Figma has outweighed any feature of almost any other graphics editor.

mortenjorck 7y ago

Affinity Designer is an excellent piece of professional creative software, but Serif’s business model is broken. They’ve erred on the other end of the spectrum from Adobe. Rather than get greedy and force users into renting their software as Adobe has, they’ve tried to stretch out a very low price of entry into a multi-year series of free updates – and it’s not working. I paid a mere $50 for Affinity Designer half a decade ago. While it’s seen some valuable updates since then, the core promise of an Illustrator killer remains out of reach: Key features like blends, pattern brushes, distortion envelopes, and more have sat on the 1.x roadmap for years, and the marquee feature of 1.8, released a few weeks ago, was a years-in-the-making bugfix for the expand stroke feature. I want to give Serif more money so they can bring Designer up to speed with Illustrator, as fifty dollars every 5+ years clearly doesn’t support the kind of development effort this requires. I don’t want to subscribe to Designer either, but there are other proven models: Look at Sketch, which has an optional, annual upgrade program, and has shipped vastly more functionality than Designer has in the same time period. My criticism isn’t entirely fair as Serif has also been occupied with launching Photo and Publisher during this time, but there’s no escaping the conclusion that Designer has stagnated. I really hope the company finds the right course correction that keeps the Affinity range affordable while sustainably funding development.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
I tend to agree. Development for Photo also has slowed down after a burst of new features after release. I am definitely wondering how they are doing financially.
- sbuk 7y ago
  I know that they’ve been focussed on getting Publisher out. Whether that is the reason for any slowdown isn’t clear.
jstummbillig 7y ago
Don't look too hard at Sketch. While they have been the first movers on what was (and to a lesser extend still is) a glaring gap in the designers toolkit, Figma has been clawing market share at lightning speed over the last 2 years. Sketch has delivered on a lot of things, but I do not think their business model is root cause of their success.

pier25 7y ago

I love Photo but the lack of group isolation in Designer is a total deal breaker for me. Working with groups is still a nightmare even after years of demands by users for this feature. See this thread started in 2014: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/1640-ad-isolation-mode/ https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/1640-ad-is...

jimbobimbo 7y ago

I'm Paint Shop Pro refugee. I started using PSP back when it was developed by Jasc. Then I bought several versions of Corel's iteration of PSP, but the quality went down quite noticeably. Affinity series is awesome. I bought their Photo last year, and today - they're running a sale - got the Designer. Very nice product!

k__ 7y ago

I'm using Gravit Designer and Photpea for a few years now. They're free and run in the browser. But I'm not doing much design work. Just shirt and badges.

uxcolumbo 7y ago

I'm an ex Photoshop user - stopped using it when they moved to a subscription model. I'm an ex Sketch user, because I moved back to Windows (feel that Apple is ripping users off and I can get better choice, quality and performance elsewhere. I don't need shiny and thin and $20 cables that break often). I like Figma - amazing what the engineering team achieved there. But it's primarily an online app and I'm worried they might get acquired by some of the bigger companies. I'm now using Affinity Designer and Photo. It does most of the things I need. It has some minor UX annoyances (or maybe my Photoshop muscle memory is not fully overwritten yet). Maybe I'm one of the dying breed that prefers to have a native app with a perpetual license and the option to choose when to upgrade and being more in control. I'm not sure whether it's sustainable for Serif to charge $49 for an app. I'd be happy to pay more if it meant they could work on those other things mentioned here by others. EDIT: typos

mattkevan 7y ago

Affinity Publisher is great too. If you have the other apps, being able to edit assets by instantly switching into Designer or Photo mode and having access to all the relevant tools is amazing. Saves so much time round-tripping between apps. Amazed Adobe hadn’t done something similar a long time ago.

bowbe 7y ago

Any Sketch-to-Designer converts here that could recommend the switch? I've been using an old standalone license of Sketch and refuse to upgrade to their subscription model. Things you like, things you miss, etc.

PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
I don't use Sketch a lot, but I like being able to set up a one-button export that spits out multiple versions. You may very well be able to do this in Designer, but I don't use their "persona" concept. Sketch suffers from some profound selection problems. It inexplicably treats all objects as filled... but only when you drag within them (but not when you click). So if you want to select a bunch of smaller objects that reside within the boundaries of a bigger one, NOPE: You'll end up moving the enclosing object when you try to drag a selection marquee around the enclosed objects. That's a deal-breaker for me. I mean... WTF. Another selection-oriented quibble in Sketch is that you can't set the default selection mode to "select only objects that are fully enclosed by the selection marquee." This is only available if you press and hold a hotkey while selecting. But that's miles ahead of Illustrator, which totally lacks this critical selection mode... a product-killer in my book. Designer offers this mode up-front as a full-time default, as does Corel Draw (which defaults to it). Inkscape has it also. I don't know how people tolerate its absence.

ilmiont 7y ago

I used Affinity Designer as my only design tool for about a year (UI design) from late 2017. I liked it overall and I liked what Serif has built it around it, even going so far as to offer printed documentation (the Workbooks) and the beautiful Affinity Spotlight website which is a really wonderful website unto itself. And there was the obvious benefit of the low cost and perpetual license. The featureset was adequate for me and the interface initially won me over. But I ended up moving away for two main reasons: 1. It tended to feel sluggish as hell. 2. Frequent crashes in the middle of work. 3. Lacking basic productivity capabilities, e.g. no ability to interact with the layers pane (rename, reorder etc.) using the keyboard shortcuts. I was running it on an i7-7700k with GTX 1080 Ti and yet there was often a perceptible delay between clicking something and the action occurring. Even expanding layers in the layer pane, or double clicking a text field... there was a very small but perceptible delay. More serious though was (3) especially combined with (1)... little things like tidying up file layers were vastly more time consuming than they should have been. I was suggested to try Figma and have never looked back. It has keyboard shortcuts for everything and all interactions feel instantaneous... even though it runs within the browser! The first time I used it I was astounded and then made the switch within weeks. Haven’t run Affinity in over 18 months and it would take a lot for me to try it again. I now run a Linux desktop anyway so not really even an option...

seangp 7y ago

I love the affinity suite. Our entire studio has switched from Adobe to Affinity and we haven’t looked back - we’re very happy. Latest version of photo supports smart objects so we can now use PSD mockup templates which was the one thing we really missed in the previous version. We do use Sketch for UI work but they have really been dropping the ball lately. We’re now running several versions behind in Sketch because of all the bugs and poor UI choices. Might even switch to Affinity designer for all our UI in the near future.

jvns 7y ago

I've been really impressed with Affinity Designer's features but I've had a lot of problems with the iPad app. It frequently uses up 100% of my disk space for no apparent reason unless I periodically uninstall and reinstall the app -- I found a lot of people in the Affinity Designer forums complaining about this issue since 2018 but it hasn't been fixed. I ended up having to stop using the iPad app because of the disk space issues and because I kept on losing work because Affinity Designer didn't save reliably.

indymike 7y ago

Affinity Designer, Publisher, and Photo are fantastic. I've been using Adobe, Corel and many open-source design tools, in most cases, since version 1. The UI is so smooth in Affinity that I usually finish work in half the time. Affinity's features set, across all three apps, is plenty good enough for professional use. Compatibility with Adobe and other design software is outstanding.

atesti 7y ago

Is it correct that I can just buy their products and own them? No online activation, no telemetry, no license checks?