The gradually expensive product line of Adobe illustrator becomes a dream of thought for digital designers. Are you on the same train to look for a low-cost, productive, and enjoyable alternative? Well, Affinity Designer is all you can try at the fraction of the price with a one-time payment option and no monthly subscriptions. As a graphic design student or a truly professional illustrator, you can start working from scratch and create something with this remarkably fast and smoothest software that you will be proud of.
The digital creative design industry has been quaintly revolutionized. To thrive on this electric pace and to challenge the rivals the UK-based Serif Labs launched the software in 2014 that is live, amenable, pro-end workhorse, and incredibly fluid. Affinity Designer has all your desired optimized tools for advanced technology on Mac, Windows, and iPad. It offers a perfect combo of vector and raster designing tools. This powerful graphic design app creates concept art, logos, icons, UI/UX designs without bloating and gimmicks. I recommend it.
Here are the main features of the software:
Broad Workspace:
Affinity Designer is an innovative illustrator that provides full-featured vector and pixel graphic design workspaces at just a single click. It empowers digital artists and professionals to use robust and comprehensive vector tools. You can achieve high productivity with cost-saving software. Moreover, it supports the best pen and node tool, constructive Boolean operation, and maintains 100 percent precise geometry with pencil and brush stabilizer.
Additionally, you can use pixel brush texture in your web graphics, typography, branding, and illustrations. This helps to edit even a single pixel in icons where your can make you vector images less crisp with the addition of grains. With pixel preview mode you can make your work more accurate by viewing it in both retina and standard resolution.
Timesaving functions:
Whether you are a beginner or an experienced designer, you will find its UI up-to-the-minute and intuitive. Affinity Designer has time-saving tools that give you the best user experience for spontaneous working. Such as the options of select same and select object let you effectively match characteristics while you can also save your preferred workspace.
Vast Compatibility:
Graphic designer needs to share their work files; therefore, compatibility matter a lot for them in this field. However, many graphic design apps do not achieve success o provide this significant convenience.
Moreover, it is seamlessly compatible with Windows, Mac, or iPad with the same file format. Affinity Designer facilitates you in the editing of PSD, AI, and EPS files. What I like the most is the option of quick updating logos or icons in an original Al file with an export facility to PSD, EPS, JPG, TIFF, etc formats.
Powerful contour tool
Affinity Designer assures you not to miss a single beat in terms of competence, workload, and output. It provides a simple way to craft abstract shapes by effortlessly adding a contour to any entity. To create a precise curve you can increase or decrease the width of an open curve. This designing app is great for architectural purposes, customize live shapes, and support vector illustrations, making a logo or printing a file.
Colour control:
Affinity designer has useful RGB or LAB color spaces. You can work even up to 32-bits for every channel. It constantly updates and now supports Pantone color swatches and a library of brushes with the custom option of setting stroke. Serif developers tried their best to facilitate you in designing for print with end-to-end CMYK and built-in ICC color management.
Besides all love for this software, designers face some drawbacks such as it lacks image tracing feature which results in automatic turning of raster illustration into editable one.
Made to cope with complexity:
This software is powerful and optimized to handle any kind of complex document and gives you the confidence to add minute details. You don’t have to worry about compromising performance as it can organize thousands of objects without lagging.
Likewise, this application gives you unlimited options for grid pattern, page guides, pixel snapping, and alignment tools. Users have full control over angles, spacing, gutters, and sub-divisions. Affinity Designer works with maximum accuracy, you can create designs with its 1,000,000% zoom feature.
Unlimited artboards:
Unlike its biggest competitor Adobe illustrator, Affinity designer is guaranteed to provide 1:1 features when working on vector illustrations only in a one-time payment of $50. For small organizations and individual designers, this is a sweet treat.
The software allows you to create infinite artboards of every size. In which you can lay out all your pages, menus, and other objects. You can save the output in any format and resolution with a single click.
During working on this software I find some terms and keyboard shortcuts somewhat more complicated which makes onboarding tricky.
Refined typography:
Web developers and graphic designers have comprehensive support and can work with creative texts for headlines or body copy; add styling to paragraphs and characters. It enables you to convert text into a curve and lets you create your own wonderful custom typography.
Alternatives:
When looking for alternatives to Affinity designer, people sometimes find it challenging when it comes to prices, qualitative customer support, and available integration. The following substitutes may ease you in any of your required functionalities:
Adobe illustrator CC:
When working on infographics and vector illustrations, experienced designers will enjoy the more advanced tools present in Illustrator CC. This is expensive software, available at a $19.99 per month subscription package. Unlike Affinity designer, Adobe has a column graph tool and perspective grid. This software provides multiple workspaces to designers for various designing jobs such as automation, web design, and custom workspace. Moreover, you also get Adobe mobile app that enables the users to produce and save editable artwork in the Cloud that can be used across various platforms.
Vectornator:
Free graphic designing software for Mac or IOs devices that creates fantastic web designs and outstanding illustrations. In this area, vectorizing an image is always a difficult, tedious, and unnatural on an iPad. Unlike affinity designer, the developers of this app resolve this issue through the introduction of an auto trace feature that is fast, intuitive, and based on machine learning. This feature liberates the designers to work without any lag or distraction.
Conclusion:
In a nutshell, the main reason behind switching to this software is its compatibility with everything at an incredibly low cost. You get live gradients, effects, 60fps Pan and Zoom feature, real-time previews, transforms, and editing curves.
Serif developers continuously update their strong and sleek software tools with the design revolution and need for creativity. This innovative app lets your ideas flow with speed, power, and accuracy. Affinity designer make your creative concept art fun while delivers a high-end output in macOS and windows.