Affinity Designer Features

Both Affinity Photo & Affinity Designer are excellent and capable replacements for the Adobe CC packages they replace. But most of all, unlike the Adobe apps they replace, I "OWN" the Affinity apps. Although I don't use Affinity software every day, when I need it, I need it immediately. I cannot afford to be denied access to leased software, simply because some black hat hacked a license server that...

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The way effects handles background textures is quite different from Photoshop and Illustrator and there is a resultant learning curve. That said, you can, with just a little more effort, achieve an output that is almost identical to what came from the comparable Adobe app. In fact, once you learn how to manipulate the effects, you can some times create a better looking output than what can be produced with an Adobe app. There are some shortcut keys that are in Adobe apps, for which I have not yet found a comparable shortcut in the Affinity apps. OTOH, there are some shortcuts in the Affinity apps that are no available at all in the comparable Adobe products. The negatives with Affinity apps are very minor, compared to the positives of being an "owned" product.

It's cheap, although it still remains less powerful that some free apps

Development seems to have ground to a halt on this app. Investing time and energy learning could be a waste of time as it may not be around in the future.

It's easy to use and has a user-friendly help section that explains how the different tools work.

Reordering page order is not easy and requires dragging each page into the proper spot.

I've been using affinity for about 3 years. It's soooo easy so great and mostly, SO QUICK ! I love designing with this software ! User experience is very cool, the customization is amazing. And the price it's like we give it to you ! I can only recommend that software !

Sometimes, I need to go to Illustrator for some specific features such as color overall management or width modification. Anyway, there are a lot of innovative feature on Illustrator that i'd love to see on affinity.

The interface is less complicated. Layer management is awesome. It supports non-destructive editing for both vector & pixel editing. It supports live preview while changing any properties like colour, font & effects of the design.

There is no image tracing option. Lacking of Shape builder tool, pattern tool, real vector brush tool made this software hard to recommend to others.

It's modern, FAST (in capitals), easy to use, affordable and regularly updated. Also, Affinity Designer (and it's companion applications Photo and Publisher) are available on both Windows and macOS with 100% file compatibility; In addition there is an iPad edition available, again with 100% compatible files and great drawing features for Apple Pencil.

The management of ,global colours' and 'normal colours' needs some getting used to. Once you know how it works, it works well, but it's a bit different than I expected.

Affinity Designer is very affordable alternative that does most things as well as Adobe Illustrator (and a few things it does even better!) The UI is actually more intuitive than Illustrator in most ways, and those who come from Photoshop or Illustrator will have absolutely no problems adjusting to it. Affinity Designer is perfect for UI design, and illustration.

Unfortunately Affinity Designer is missing some of the more advanced features available in Illustrator, though none of these will be a deal-breaker for most users. The Affinity suite of apps also seems to have some (mostly non-critical) issues with memory management. Complex files can cause the software to become rather sluggish even on high-end computers. Adobe Illustrator is not immune to this, but this seems to happen with less complex files with Affinity Designer.

It's almost impossible to judge any vector illustration software without drawing comparisons (excuse the pun) to Adobe Illustrator, and in many ways Affinity Designer compares very well. It certainly feels fast, as a modern, native Mac app should. And unlike Illustrator, you can buy the app for a very affordable one-time purchase—no monthly subscriptions. Affinity has done a great job of unifying (mostly) all their apps, and this has to be mentioned too—Designer exists as part of an ecosystem, which for many designers, makes it the first genuine alternative to Adobe's Creative Cloud.

I have not found the transition from Adobe apps to be an altogether easy one. In some part, that is just the nature of switching from tools that one has grown very familiar with over many years. But some of it goes beyond that. The Affinity apps (and Designer is no exception) exhibit some *interesting* UI behaviours. Some of the more frustrating ones: - poor windows management, making Separated Mode...

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Coming from Illustrator, it's very easy to adapt to, just minor differences in some workflows, but mostly it's intuitive. It can open and edit Illustrator files if they are pdf compatible, even deal with complex things like knockout groups correctly. It's also has some great ideas that I was pleasantly surprised by that made the workflow better and faster. Affinity devs listen to user feedback and regularly update their apps, so any features that it lacks it will probably get soon.

Lack of a good font manager, it just takes the fonts you have installed in your OS. No Google fonts integration or anything like Adobe Fonts, so if you're missing fonts you have to manually find them online and (buy or) download them the old-fashioned way. Some odd workflow choices, minor things that can slow you down. Like no native way to permanently reset the bounding box of an object after it has been rotated, they have a toggle that works for 1 operation and switches back to the (skewed or rotated) original. The align UI and the order of actions to chose what to align to what is strange and can waste time. Other minor things like that that I ran into, but all in all it works well and gets the job done.

This is a fantastic alternative to Adobe's Illustrator, especially at Affinity's pricepoint. To be fair, we're not a design agency first, we make websites and do marketing primarily. However, when we do want to work with vector graphics, Affinity Designer matches up almost 1:1 with Adobe Illustrator. The real pro is the one-time fee of $50 instead of a full adobe suite subscription. This allows our...

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Some of the terminology and keyboard shortcuts made the onboarding slightly more difficult for our long-time Adobe Illustrator users, but they've adopted nicely over time. There's always growing pains when you switch tools, but there are many more features that do match up 1:1 that this was a no brainer for our company.

I have been looking for software like inDesign and Photoshop without breaking the bank. I wanted software that was functional, easy to use and set up, and something that didn't require a subscription. When I found Affinity, I was blown away with how good it was. And the fact that the publisher software works hand in hand with the photo software is a very nice touch. Coming from Adobe, the learning curve was relatively low, and I could open my old adobe files and pick up where I left off. Very, very happy with my purchase.

If I have to include cons, I'm going to have to be nit-picky. I wish I could safe natively to other file types (I can export to indesign file types, or photoshop file types, just not with the save function) but that is very minor. In some documents, exporting to a PDF took some time, although it was a very large document and not normal to do under any piece of software. Overall though, these are very, very minor issues.

- You can create and handle CMYK documents. - The user interface is extremely simple which makes it easy to pick up and learn it. - You can save files on different drives and you are capable of performing live updates on the storage file. - You have the option to generate procedural vectors and self created as well. - The effects and alterations on your designs are extremely fast, the refreshing is...

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- You do not have the access to all of the Adobe programs like Premiere, Dream weaver, After effects, etc. - The tools it has are not as convenient as the shape builder form the competitor.

Great set of features and sensible pricing, updated regularly

Sometimes doesn't export how you'd expect in all formats

when i was starting my career as an animator, so i need a program in which i work to create vector designs and illustration to animate. so i have 2 options in front of me adobe illustrator which is very popular and affinity designer. i have seen the interface of both, and i find affinity designer very easy and simple to create these illustration. it is less confusing for beginners. affinity has a better interface than adobe illustrator. i like it's features and they provided 2 different sections like design persona and pixel persona. it is very helpful for me. yes using affinity i have started my career and now i am successfully running my firm.

there is nothing to dislike about but as the area which they need to focus is exporting and file compatibility with other software's. this is the only one thing which i find little hard to deal with using affinity as i am using adobe after effects for animations and only eps and png files are supported so it's increases the work while exporting and also there is one problem with export. when exporting and submitting to websites like shutterstock it is unapproved because of rasterization problem and if i select nothing will be rasterized then it will remove all the effects like if i have choosen the transparency effect so it will remove the effect and give me solid color. so that's something i can't figure out till now.

It's a powerful tool for vectorial drawing, it has everything a designer needs to create, it's very easy to use and learn and can switch with other raster drawing software (affinity photo). The computer requirements are very low, so the software can work even on old computers. It has been developer both for Mac and Win, and has a full compatibility with Adobe's Suite.

The interaction with wacom's graphic tablets could be improved. That's all.

It is an essential App in my work. Easy to use and intuitive, multiplatform on Win Mac iPad (no iPhone). It is constantly updated and is a reference in the current design software. Library of plugins, brushes, fonts, gradients... own and third party. Very good community to ask questions and excellent tutorial channel.

Compared to applications with much more time and experience, they may not have more complex tools. But with knowledge of what you are doing you can achieve the same result.

I like how much you get for the money you pay. It is a one-time payment, very budget-friendly, and you get a software that gives you everything you need to create what you have in mind: create a logo, write something or make an amazing artwork to print, to share. I am still amazed by the things that you can do with this software.

It is not that I don't like this, but you really need to put in the time and energy to learn it. And this was expected because you can create such amazing things with it. You can find tutorials and classes that will guide you. Just take your time and don't give up.

First of all, because when you create vector elements and delete a point, it does not destroy the whole element that you've created. I like that you can organize in folders what you are doing and by double clicking on an item in the folder you selected it and you can edit it. For now, I've used affinity designer to make pdf documents as giveaway for my readers on the blog and to make design for my cutting machine. When I bought the application I received some templates to use, I have not used them yet but I assume they are useful. You can also create artboards to make design for sites and applications. You can export each artboard separately in different formats.

I faced a little problem. It is not compatible with Adobe Illustrator. At work I had this program and I sent a file home to make some changes but I could not do that because I could not open my document. Instead I have no problems with the eps format.

Affinity's Designer is the closest thing to Adobe's Illustrator. Yet it has other great options. I particularly like how you can switch between vector and pixel mode. Additionally, it's really smooth to use. That's quite a hard thing to explain but it just works really well. It's also partly about how it feels like a mix of InDesign and Illustrator. I particularly like how you can easily export to many different formats.

I can't say there's anything really. I'm still slightly adjusting to the details of this from Adobe but that's to be expected, not that there's that much to pick up really.

Affinity Designer has all the features of other, more expensive software options, with a clean customizable interface. It loads faster than other software we have used and are very responsive to customer requests.

Truthfully there's very little negative about Affinity Designer. Every con I've had has been addressed by the company and fixed or added. If something does come up, I'm sure they'll fix it or integrate a new function.

Affinity Designer was created from the ground up to provide a solution to the major frustration I always had when it comes to design - having to work with bitmap in one application, and vector in another. Affinity Designer allows you to quickly switch between vector and pixel persona so you can work on the same file within the same app.

Bit of a learning curve and while it is simplified to provide only the features the vast majority use in their daily workflows, it comes at the cost of some more advanced stuff you could be used to, such as action automations.

It’s fast, and very easy to install. The price is great - it’s surprisingly cheap for such a fully featured, regularly updated piece of software. Virtually all of the tools available in Adobe Illustrator are present.

Some tools are missing. Having a quick “Save for web” option is a big miss, but the export functions do work well. No mesh warp.

The one-time purchase rather than year/monthly subscriptions is a big win for me, only with $25 you can have this app until you die or forgot your account. Very affordable to students and small business owners like me. I can import Photoshop (.psd) format into affinity and it just works. Affinity Designer also doing updates regularly to polished the app more further and removing some bugs.

Although affinity and Photoshop have similar tools, it just feels different if you using Photoshop for long time before switching to Affinity Designer. Beside that I don't find any cons or downside

Adobe isn't exactly the most loved software company in the world right now, not even among designers who depend and even like its products. So if you dislike Adobe as much as I do, Serif's Affinity Designer has at least these things going for it: No subscriptions! Great, personal support! Engaged-with-the-community developers! Not built by a boring, unresponsive, impassive corporation that ignores...

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Not as power-packed as Illustrator so some task still need Adobe, particularly for prepress. (For prototyping, you probably want Sketch.) Not as impressive as its sister application Affinity Photo. Proprietary format is obviously not an industry-standard like Adobe. No iPad app yet.