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I've been using Affinity Designer since its beta in 2014, and it has made the gradual decomposition of Illustrator CS6 (the last non-rental version, effectively
by mortenjorck 5y ago
I've been using Affinity Designer since its beta in 2014, and it has made the gradual decomposition of Illustrator CS6 (the last non-rental version, effectively unusable on modern MacOS) much easier to endure.
For my professional needs, Designer is a perfect fit, as I only use it when I need to design an icon that would be too complex for Sketch. For side projects, I've made it work – for all the effort Serif has put into improving the fundamentals, Designer remains a feature-poor Illustrator replacement for complex illustration.
Serif's long-term aims with its vector package remain a mystery to me. Circa 2015, they had a public roadmap of everything they planned to add to the 1.x branch, including key illustration features such as shape blends and distortion envelopes. That roadmap has long since been deleted, and most of the features added to Designer since then have been subtle workflow enhancements (a contour tool last year was a notable exception).
The obvious explanation for this is that $50 six years ago isn't enough to sustainably develop all the functionality of a full Illustrator replacement, but to that end, I wonder why Serif hasn't made any movement toward a paid upgrade path.
- Eric_WVGG 5y agoI'm in a similar boat. Very happy to be out of the Adobe ecosystem, but just not seeing a lot of action feature-wise from Affinity. Notably, I've been waiting on some kind of bitmap auto-trace, a thing that's been standard in Illustrator for at least fifteen years. Pixelmator seems to be on a much better track than Affinity Photo for bitmap editing, but I'm just not aware of a better alternative to Illustrator than Affinity Designer.
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoPresumably Serif is either still working on the level of improvements that would justify a v2, or simply don't think adding more income/manpower will output a better product. I appreciate that while I know they'll inevitably launch a v2, they didn't choose to claim every possible dollar on the table on the way there.
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoI wonder if the market for vector tools is small compared to bitmap/photo tools. Anecdotally I know a lot of people using Photoshop but nobody who uses Illustrator.
- charrondev 5y agoI’d imagine one of the biggest uses of vector design tools is UI design. This market has been absolutely devoured by Figma (a web based vector design tool).
- angst_ridden 5y agoI find Designer a really good low-end CAD package. You can enter dimensions in whatever units, enter math (e.g., 12in - 3/8 in + 0.22mm). It's great for simple designs to send to the laser-cutter or vinyl cutter for making physical products.
- spiderfarmer 5y agoHaha, I designed a shed using Designer and used the measurements there to actually build it.
- codeptualize 5y agoI do also wonder about that. I think so far maybe they have enough revenue from the different apps they have created (Publisher/iPad apps). So far.. I have bought all haha. But even then it's not that much. Before I thought they might still be coasting on their old products, but afaik they discontinued those.
- gardaani 5y agoVectorstyler is a new vector graphics app for Mac and Windows. It has more features than Affinity Designer: distortion envelopes, bitmap tracing, shape blends.. some features are even more advanced than in Illustrator. Check if it fits your needs. https://www.vectorstyler.com https://www.vectorstyler.com