It’s easy to develop an affinity for Serif’s latest release of its vector editing graphic design software, Affinity Designer 1.10.0. That’s high praise from this writer, a longtime Adobe Illustrator user. When the British-born app debuted in 2014 as a Mac-only tool, Windows users had already been using the company’s DrawPlus vector editing tool. Soon after, DrawPlus was scrapped, and so began the dual-platform succession of the Affinity line, which includes the vector-based Designer, pixel-based Affinity Photo, and Affinity Publisher for producing long documents. With the ubiquity of Adobe’s parallel workhorse trio (Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign), the burning question is: What can Affinity Designer do that Illustrator can’t? Read on to find out.
How Much Does Affinity Designer Cost?
As mentioned, you don’t need to pay a monthly or annual subscription to use Affinity Designer. It’s just a one-time $54.99 for either the Mac or Windows software; the version for the iPad costs $21.99. Not only is that much cheaper than Adobe’s competing subscription-based apps, which will run you $239.88 per year at a minimum, but it’s also considerably less than CorelDraw, which costs a one-time payment of $299. On the downside, there’s no upgrade pricing, so when a new major version arrives, you have to pay the full price again.
The software runs on macOS 10.09 Mavericks or later and Windows 10 April 2020 update or later. Apple Silicon M1 processors are supported natively, and Windows PCs need DirectX 10-compatible or later graphics hardware for graphics acceleration to work.
Getting Started With Affinity Designer
Launch the app and a scrolling window greets you with announcements and tips, and on the right are links to sample work, tutorials, and the Affinity Design community to further ease your way.
To begin a project, choose one of the many page-size and device-type options to launch a new main window, which Affinity calls the Studio. There, in addition to standard hover-over tooltips, you find a handy contextual footer bar to guide you when you’re not sure how to work with your selection, how to use a selected tool, or what a tool’s various keyboard shortcuts are.
Adding to my increasing comfort with the app was learning that many of Illustrator’s key commands carry over to Affinity Designer, which is a huge boon for keyboard commanders like me. In fact, Affinity Design allows complete keyboard shortcut customization of your Studio, including key commands on the desktop version, and iPad version if you have a keyboard attached.
When setting up a new document, the dialog window presents all expected options, including desired units, color space and profile, margins, and bleeds for print work. As you build your project, Affinity Designer keeps you organized behind the scenes with intelligent layers. Contextual toolsets are plentiful and offer up-front availability that’s buried in similar programs.
Shape-Shifting Vector Tools
As my eyes drifted down the stack of tools, I was delighted to find one sporting a wineglass icon—the transparency tool. Below that are the shapes tools, which is where we will begin.
I like that Affinity Designer provides such a smorgasbord of shape options—13 more than the old standards you find in Illustrator (that is, without Astute Graphics’ Dynamic Shapes plug-in).
What’s more, many shapes have editable dynamic points for changing the form’s characteristics:
Vector or Raster—What’s your
With Affinity Designer you get cake and can eat it too, with the Persona Panel, which allows successive, in-app switching between vector and raster workspaces. This is fantastic for softening typically crisp vector art with raster textures, and it’s especially welcome for folks whose workflow necessitates shifting between Illustrator and Photoshop. Note, however, that for a full-featured pixel-based Affinity application, you will need to look at Affinity Photo. There are three Personas: Vector, Raster, and Export.
The benefit of having both formats handy at once is that you can add a hewn look to typically crisp, hard-edged vector work in a single app.
Here’s a little background refresher on the practical difference between vector and raster images in case the above perplexed you: Raster images are pixel-based and don’t enlarge well. Since all of the image’s pixels are maintained, when you scale them up you end up with jagged edges. Raster file types include TIFF, JPG, PNG and GIF. Vector image files are defined by shapes, lines, and curves. This makes them resolution independent, and therefore infinitely scalable without suffering loss of quality. Vector file types include .ai, .eps, and PDFs without raster images. Raster images are suited for photographs and textures, where you need many different shades of color and you need pixels to stay exactly as in the original image. Vectors make sense for drawings, text, animation, logos, and technical drawings where you need to be able to enlarge without loss of edge sharpness.
3 Unexpected Gems
First up, the Contour Tool, combined with compound shapes gives me goosebumps. Presently, to make a cool magma-like meta-ball graphic in Illustrator, I need to use JavaScript and make one connection at a time. Affinity Designer’s Contour Tool allows me to create the image dynamically—and it remains editable.
Second is the Photoshop-style History panel, which maintains a chronological list of all your actions. If you go back and change your history, Affinity Designer annotates that instance in the timeline as a Cycle Future (the branch symbol to the right of the panel). This means you can revert your work nonlinearly. It’s like Ctrl-Z (or Command-z on Macs) with superpowers. As if that weren’t enough, when your work is complete, you can save the history state data within your file when you close it. When you reopen the file, there it is!
The third unexpected gem is the delicious responsivity you find when using a stylus with Designer on the iPad and desktop. On both platforms, the app offers ten categories of vector brushes—Acrylic, Dry Media, Engraving, Gouaches, Inks, Markers, Oils, Pencils, Pens, and Watercolors—each having 12 fully-editable individual brushes.
Affinity Designer’s brushes feel more like Adobe Fresco’s Live Brushes than the ones in Illustrator. If you’ve tried Fresco, you may have noticed the visible molten lava flow that continues morphing the stroke until you pick up your stylus, finger, or cursor. This flow is controlled by adjusting the rope-length stabilizer in the contextual brush parameters.
Integrations, Sharing, & Output
A happy extra is that Affinity Designer comes with in-app search tabs for free stock images powered by two third parties, Pixabay (vector and raster) and Pexels (raster).
Sharing documents between Illustrator and Affinity designer isn’t perfect at this writing—especially for finer typography and grouped graphics with effects applied. Add to that my third-party font manager, Fusion Suitcase, was not immediately recognized, though Fusion does have drag-and-drop support for all Affinity products.
Affinity Designer offers ample export options, which feel more straightforward than those of competitive apps because they’re all accessible within a single window. There you can decide to export portions (or slices) of an artboard, or the entire board, and finally, you can choose a resampling method for either upsampling or downsampling.
All Types of Typography
Affinity Designer offers three tools for taking control of your type: the Frame, Artistic, and Path Text Tools. Frame text is your choice for formatting paragraphs and creating columns within a rectangular frame—or within any other shape you desire. Use the Artistic Text Tool when you want to wrangle the letters of a single word or header, or to create a wordmark. With this tool you can modify text shape as if it were any other object. Finally, the Path Text Tool facilitates the placement of words along a defined path.
The Character and Paragraph Styles panels offer a rich assortment of tools—all in one place. Of interest were the number of up-front optical alignment, justification, and numbering controls.
We Have an Affinity for This App
Affinity Designer has enough speed, support, and unique features unavailable in competitive apps, that for the price, we can’t justify not buying it. If you’re sick of signing your life away with dozens of software and service subscriptions, Affinity Designer will be a welcome relief and worth every penny. Despite all the positive vibes for Affinity Designer, Adobe Illustrator remains our Editors’ Choice winner for graphic design programs, for its super-slick user interface and large, industry-standard ecosystem of plug-ins and compatibility.
