Spoiler Alert: It's not hard, even if you're an amateur like me.
The hardest part is actually learning how to draw with vectors.
It's now my go-to for designing vector images, which can help me to make a logo for my website or a character + scene or idea design for my book covers (in comedies and coming-of-age fiction). It's not just innovative, it's efficient: one of the functional reasons (outside the obvious cost benefit) to using Affinity Anything over Adobe Anything (including Illustrator, it's main competition).īut the funny thing is that once I bought Designer (and Photo), I saw a need for it. I never have to exit the program or swap the image file I need to work on.
By having a copy of Designer, I can use its full feature set right inside Publisher (same with Photo).
within a print layout for magazines, books (my exact use case), posters, fliers, or any other printed publication for business.
The only reason I bought it (and its product sibling, Affinity Photo) was because the product I actually wanted (Affinity Publisher) has a component called "Studio Link" that allows owners of Designer and Photo to switch "personas," which is a fancy word for summoning the tool set for Designer or Photo, whenever they need to update an image, logo, vector, landscape photo, etc. Overall: I should start by saying that I didn't think I'd need Affinity Designer when I bought it. Since going cross-platform there have been many reports of Designer's instability and since the implementation of Apples Metal API The developers themselves are notoriously unresponsive to please for further development. Convert to curves produces hilariously unusable results and things like Offset Path simply don't exist. These are tools which are actually provided by many free editors.įurthermore, many tools are very poorly implemented. With the exception of skew, vectors cannot be distorted in any way (including perspective) and it even lacks a knife tool. So we're left with an app which lacks some of the most fundamental vector editing tools.
I wouldn't wish to speculate if this software will even be supported in a few years. The developers have moved on to other projects, and it seems to me that for all intents and purposes, development on this software has been abandoned. The few updates which have come down the line have focused on things like the app icon. It's been two years now and not a single thing on that list has been implemented. I have been trying to integrate Affinity Designer into a professional workflow for a number of years now but I've come to the conclusion that it's just too painful and there is nothing to indicate that this will improve.īack when I first purchased this app the developers were promising a roadmap of future improvements which would bring it closer to some of the industry-standard vector apps out there. You're just going to like using it and it's just not going to be that big of an impact to your business. When I first started looking at this process, I was scared about being able to convert files and all that. My recommendation is to just go ahead and switch over to Affinity Designer. So we didn't have any downtime in converting and just starting to use Affinity Designer. But after that, all the tools within the program were almost exactly the same as Adobe Illustrator. There was those little problems when you first start out learning how to load up your old files and converting them into new format. Well, integrating Affinity Designer into our business really wasn't that difficult. And really when it comes right down to it, the cost was just incredible for what you get. So the main reasons why we switched over to Affinity Designer was, it was very compatible with everything. So that's one of the reasons why we switched over to Affinity Designer. And we weren't getting the cost benefit from it. Well, when we first started out, we were using the Adobe Cloud products and those products are great and all, but it was just getting way too expensive to maintain over time. And I give Affinity Designer a five out of five. I am a web designer and I work with other small businesses to design their websites.