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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

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).
detritus 7y ago
It sounds like we've been in the same boat, for about the same amount of time. I've gone from being a total Adobe fanboy (who isn't a fanboy in their late teens and twenties?) but it's a company that I absolutely cannot stand now - primarily because of the infliction of the subscription model, which I now pay more for (can't skip releases) and am totally locked-into and resentful of. And yes, there're oodles of issues that have been going around for years but are never resolved (my recent one (ie; for two years now) - do I have x instances of 'CEPHtmlEngine' running, taking up processes, or do I delete the CEPHtmlEngine folder, suffer a couple of popups and then occasionally have my hard disk filled with 26x 16mb files A MINUTE when working on large documents? Fun choice!). I don't even use the Affinity software, but I've bought them, purely because I want Adobe to have competition. from a software standpoint, I could probably get away with Illy CS2 - the 'features' added since then have been .. mostly irrelevant. But if I don't have a subscription, I can't open client files. - ed: numerous typos
- egypturnash 7y ago
  It’s not at the point where it’s a completely abusive marriage, it’s still less hassle than changing over the huge pile of graphic styles I’ve built for my current GN would be (~100p in volume 1, 5 or 6 total chapters of similar size of all goes well), I like having the font subscription (though I should look into ways to grab those out of wherever Adobe sticks then in case one I rely on gets pulled), there’s definitely things I’d miss if I went back to cs2 (transparent gradients, width profiles, multiple artboards, speed rewrites, pattern editing, god I would kill anyone who tried to make me do patterns the old way (does Affinity even HAVE patterns? It seems to only do bitmap patterns), gradient strokes, auto type area resizes, and that’s just looking at Wikipedia’s chart of features up to 2014) But it’s such a product of a bureaucracy, built by people who never use it, and who awkwardly interface with the people who do.
  - detritus 7y ago
    > transparent gradients Oh crikey - I forgot about the workarounds to achieve transparent gradients back in the old days! And we not that long ago got the ability to [finally] open PDFs with more than one page, which is - well, the fact that it didn't happen a decade or more ago - telling.
Applejinx 7y ago
I went to Affinity Photo for certain photoshop-like things: very happy with how it's working out, within limits. No hesitation there. Clip Studio's a special case. For certain uses, such as cartooning/comicing, it is WAY better than anything Photoshop can offer. I've got that as well and look forward to digging into it further, but even with extremely basic familiarity the tools for building panels/folders and speech bubbles in Clip Studio (or pretty much anything for a cartoonist/manga artist, especially if you're targeting black and white printed output) are so far beyond Adobe stuff it's quite silly. I daresay there are parallels for UI people with Figma/Sketch or what have you. I can speak to the Clip Studio situation (and I'm also happy with Affinity Photo for what it specializes in).
jiveturkey 7y ago
Agree with you 99%! > but I can really see Affinity being a lot more appealing to new artists. Even experienced ones! Affinity Designer et al. are fantastic! The workbooks they publish (advanced user guides) free video tutorials are great as well. And they have a much nicer community than Adobe -- much more clueful and helpful. In no way should my comment (that Adobe is better) be taken as even a hint of negativity towards Affinity. They fill different needs, or should I say, a different spectrum of needs. My main complaint is all the people griping about Adobe's subscription model. Who cares??? If Affinity is so good, use that instead! If you find you need the much richer feature set of Illustrator, guess what -- pony up. I personally wish that Affinity would either charge more or move to subscription. $50/yr really? I would love to pay $50/yr to see the most infuriatingly simple yet absent features get implemented. Especially now since I've been forced to Catalina and can no longer use my CS6 products. But that's not where we are, and doesn't give me grounds to complain that a product I want is expensive. > Illustrator is really, really ripe for disruption and self-driving cars are right around the corner ...

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).

detritus 7y ago

It sounds like we've been in the same boat, for about the same amount of time. I've gone from being a total Adobe fanboy (who isn't a fanboy in their late teens and twenties?) but it's a company that I absolutely cannot stand now - primarily because of the infliction of the subscription model, which I now pay more for (can't skip releases) and am totally locked-into and resentful of. And yes, there're oodles of issues that have been going around for years but are never resolved (my recent one (ie; for two years now) - do I have x instances of 'CEPHtmlEngine' running, taking up processes, or do I delete the CEPHtmlEngine folder, suffer a couple of popups and then occasionally have my hard disk filled with 26x 16mb files A MINUTE when working on large documents? Fun choice!). I don't even use the Affinity software, but I've bought them, purely because I want Adobe to have competition. from a software standpoint, I could probably get away with Illy CS2 - the 'features' added since then have been .. mostly irrelevant. But if I don't have a subscription, I can't open client files. - ed: numerous typos

egypturnash 7y ago
It’s not at the point where it’s a completely abusive marriage, it’s still less hassle than changing over the huge pile of graphic styles I’ve built for my current GN would be (~100p in volume 1, 5 or 6 total chapters of similar size of all goes well), I like having the font subscription (though I should look into ways to grab those out of wherever Adobe sticks then in case one I rely on gets pulled), there’s definitely things I’d miss if I went back to cs2 (transparent gradients, width profiles, multiple artboards, speed rewrites, pattern editing, god I would kill anyone who tried to make me do patterns the old way (does Affinity even HAVE patterns? It seems to only do bitmap patterns), gradient strokes, auto type area resizes, and that’s just looking at Wikipedia’s chart of features up to 2014) But it’s such a product of a bureaucracy, built by people who never use it, and who awkwardly interface with the people who do.
- detritus 7y ago
  > transparent gradients Oh crikey - I forgot about the workarounds to achieve transparent gradients back in the old days! And we not that long ago got the ability to [finally] open PDFs with more than one page, which is - well, the fact that it didn't happen a decade or more ago - telling.

Applejinx 7y ago

I went to Affinity Photo for certain photoshop-like things: very happy with how it's working out, within limits. No hesitation there. Clip Studio's a special case. For certain uses, such as cartooning/comicing, it is WAY better than anything Photoshop can offer. I've got that as well and look forward to digging into it further, but even with extremely basic familiarity the tools for building panels/folders and speech bubbles in Clip Studio (or pretty much anything for a cartoonist/manga artist, especially if you're targeting black and white printed output) are so far beyond Adobe stuff it's quite silly. I daresay there are parallels for UI people with Figma/Sketch or what have you. I can speak to the Clip Studio situation (and I'm also happy with Affinity Photo for what it specializes in).

jiveturkey 7y ago

Agree with you 99%! > but I can really see Affinity being a lot more appealing to new artists. Even experienced ones! Affinity Designer et al. are fantastic! The workbooks they publish (advanced user guides) free video tutorials are great as well. And they have a much nicer community than Adobe -- much more clueful and helpful. In no way should my comment (that Adobe is better) be taken as even a hint of negativity towards Affinity. They fill different needs, or should I say, a different spectrum of needs. My main complaint is all the people griping about Adobe's subscription model. Who cares??? If Affinity is so good, use that instead! If you find you need the much richer feature set of Illustrator, guess what -- pony up. I personally wish that Affinity would either charge more or move to subscription. $50/yr really? I would love to pay $50/yr to see the most infuriatingly simple yet absent features get implemented. Especially now since I've been forced to Catalina and can no longer use my CS6 products. But that's not where we are, and doesn't give me grounds to complain that a product I want is expensive. > Illustrator is really, really ripe for disruption and self-driving cars are right around the corner ...