1. Is Affinity Designer Better Than Illustrator

If you haven’t heard, Affinity Designer is a vector-based app that truly gives Adobe Illustrator a run for its money. Designed by Serif out of the UK, Affinity Designer has been created by designers for designers and holds a variety of features that are smartly chosen and super useful for creatives. Affinity Designer essentially functions like an Illustrator and Photoshop hybrid, bringing in features from both apps. Whether you are a branding, print, web, or package designer, Affinity Designer has something for you.

The interface design has a familiarity to it that most people will like. Affinity Designer looks like an Adobe product, and that’s good. Smart, intuitive and well-organized, creatives will have no problem adapting to working in the Affinity Designer environment.

Affinity Designer provides a compatible app as well. It supports a large collection of file types like EPS, PDF, PNG, TIFF, and GIF for import and export. File conversion is also simple—you can open a PSD, AI, or EPS file and edit them right from within Affinity Designer. While saving back to AI format isn’t a feature, you can save anything you are working on as a PSD.

Similar to Illustrator, Affinity gives you the ability to use the Shift key to constrain the proportions of the shape while dragging (useful when creating squares, perfect circles, etc.), and/or the Control key to draw or resize the shape from the center out. Affinity Designer (Windows and Mac) - $49.99/year; Affinity Designer vs Illustrator – Who Wins? Affinity Designer is a great alternative to Illustrator, but this program is not suitable for all users. This is a great vector graphics software with an impressive set of tools. Apr 6, 2021 - This article introduces the free downloadable brushes for Affinity Designer & Photo. All of them are available right now, so be sure to download and use. Certainly, there is no doubt that both Affinity Designer and Adobe Illustrator are powerful choices for creating vector graphic designs. But Adobe Illustrator is taking the first place. However, even the Affinity Designer also has an array of features to offer you. The fact that Affinity Designer is a little cheaper than Adobe Illustrator. So, if you have a hard time wrapping your head around Adobe Illustrator or just want to add another tool to your arsenal, Affinity Designer could be for you. At the end of the day, the thing that I like the most about Affinity Designer is that it allows me to think more creatively and less technically.

Perhaps most importantly, Affinity Designer is affordable, it costs $39.99 to buy and you’re not tied into a subscription with this app. Right now they are offering a special appealing to web designers—you get 20% off as well and the Grade UI kit for $58.

Until recently Affinity Designer was only available for MAC, however, they have recently released a Beta Windows version, which you can download here.

Here Is Why Affinity Designer Stands Out

• Affinity Designer supports a wide color space including RGB, CMYK, Lab, Grayscale and Pantone.
• You can Zoom over 1,000,000%, which makes creating refined design work much easier.
• Adjustments and effects are non-destructive. You can apply as many effects as you like and still revert back to your original.
• A huge library of adjustment layers, effects and blend modes you can apply to masks and clipping layers.
• Custom workspaces for many kinds of projects.
• A fun, useful and comprehensive shape library and shapes you can adjust and modify with easy-to-understand controls.
• Refined typographic control and text styles.
• Powerful artboards designed with responsive and app design in mind.
• Support for Symbols. You can make one instance of an object, like a button, use it across a project, but have to change it only once.

Margaret Penney is the Managing Editor of Notes on Design. Margaret is a teacher, designer, writer and new media artist and founder of Hello Creative Co.

For creatives seeking a thorough training in illustration and graphic design, Sessions College offers accredited fully online illustration certificate and illustration degree programs. Contact Admissions for more information.

If you haven’t heard, Affinity Designer is a vector-based app that truly gives Adobe Illustrator a run for its money. Designed by Serif out of the UK, Affinity Designer has been created by designers for designers and holds a variety of features that are smartly chosen and super useful for creatives. Affinity Designer essentially functions like an Illustrator and Photoshop hybrid, bringing in features from both apps. Whether you are a branding, print, web, or package designer, Affinity Designer has something for you.

The interface design has a familiarity to it that most people will like. Affinity Designer looks like an Adobe product, and that’s good. Smart, intuitive and well-organized, creatives will have no problem adapting to working in the Affinity Designer environment.

Affinity Designer provides a compatible app as well. It supports a large collection of file types like EPS, PDF, PNG, TIFF, and GIF for import and export. File conversion is also simple—you can open a PSD, AI, or EPS file and edit them right from within Affinity Designer. While saving back to AI format isn’t a feature, you can save anything you are working on as a PSD.

Perhaps most importantly, Affinity Designer is affordable, it costs $39.99 to buy and you’re not tied into a subscription with this app. Right now they are offering a special appealing to web designers—you get 20% off as well and the Grade UI kit for $58.

Until recently Affinity Designer was only available for MAC, however, they have recently released a Beta Windows version, which you can download here.

Here Is Why Affinity Designer Stands Out

• Affinity Designer supports a wide color space including RGB, CMYK, Lab, Grayscale and Pantone.
• You can Zoom over 1,000,000%, which makes creating refined design work much easier.
• Adjustments and effects are non-destructive. You can apply as many effects as you like and still revert back to your original.
• A huge library of adjustment layers, effects and blend modes you can apply to masks and clipping layers.
• Custom workspaces for many kinds of projects.
• A fun, useful and comprehensive shape library and shapes you can adjust and modify with easy-to-understand controls.
• Refined typographic control and text styles.
• Powerful artboards designed with responsive and app design in mind.
• Support for Symbols. You can make one instance of an object, like a button, use it across a project, but have to change it only once.

Margaret Penney is the Managing Editor of Notes on Design. Margaret is a teacher, designer, writer and new media artist and founder of Hello Creative Co.

For creatives seeking a thorough training in illustration and graphic design, Sessions College offers accredited fully online illustration certificate and illustration degree programs. Contact Admissions for more information.

Is Affinity Designer Better Than Illustrator