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Affinity Designer – Illustrator alternative

affinity.serif.com

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Re: Affinity Designer – Illustrator alternative

#11

Post by egypturnash »

radley wrote: post #5
sbarre wrote: post #3

I wonder how this compares to Sketch? There seem to be a bunch of Mac-only vector apps coming out in recent years.. Not just these direct Illustrator competitors, but HTML5 animation tools too like Hype, Paintcode, etc.. that provide vector drawing and animation tools, and are coming from small teams and cost very little (relatively speaking)... Is this because there are more powerful native components in OS X that m…

It's Adobe. Illustrator is buggy and inaccurate with UI flaws that have existed for years. Plus the subscription model really messed with pro indies who paid for CS. We're looking for a big change ASAP. Really interested to see if this works. Most indie vector apps have not been ready for production use.

I think a lot of 'not ready for production use' is that Illustrator is a huge program that's old enough to vote with a zillion features, and pretty much every little feature is a dealbreaker for SOMEONE.

That said hey I'm certainly willing to give this one a try and drop some notes on them as to what my particular dealbreakers turn out to be. I'm betting it'll lack global color swatches, I've never seen anything besides AI do those and I love it.

Re: Affinity Designer – Illustrator alternative

#14

Post by nyar »

It isn't an alternative.

Illustrator runs on Windows and Mac, this runs on Mac. I don't have a mac, nor do I want one, so this is unusable.

Now tell me about how design has to be done on a and how the sleek $2000 plastic encasing the computer helps you do it.

Re: Affinity Designer – Illustrator alternative

#15

Post by teilo »

What with the Adobe CC subscription fiasco, my company is already looking for alternatives that we can use wherever it makes sense. Adobe, as part of their new subscription model, is trying to force us unto paying 40% more per seat than an individual license would cost. At that price we would be paying significantly more than we did when we just purchased upgrades. (We have upwards of 80+ seats.)

So far I have managed to push back and make Adobe give me the same pricing for new Teams seats as individuals pay. Not sure how long I'm going to manage that, however, as we are already in "special deal" territory.

We are at the point of using CC for nothing but interop with our customers and vendors wherever we can, and pushing our designers into using alternative tools wherever possible. If Adobe doesn't get their head out of their rear end, we will be buying less software from them, not more.

Re: Affinity Designer – Illustrator alternative

#17

Post by gulpahum »

This reminds me of Mischief (for Mac and PC) [1], which is incredibly fast vector drawing application.

The way Mischief handles its details of graphics, speed and huge range of zoom is by using adaptively sampled distance fields (patented technology) [2].

It would be nice to know if Affinity Designer uses some advanced technology to achieve similar properties.

[1] http://www.madewithmischief.com [2] http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~frisken/frisken.html

Re: Affinity Designer – Illustrator alternative

#18

Post by fidotron »

rodgerd wrote: post #16

I'd give a lot for a Freehand alternative - I never really cottoned on to the Illustrator way of drawing.

Absolutely. The Illustrator near monopoly has been a disaster for a lot of people in either the Freehand, Corel Draw or more esoteric areas.

It's mildly amusing this is back to Mac-only territory, given that the reason things like Xara were Windows only in the mid 90s was the logic of the era was design and publishing was going to become a Windows NT stronghold, which underestimated the stickiness of custom AppleScript and Quark XTensions.

Re: Affinity Designer – Illustrator alternative

#19

Post by Tloewald »

gulpahum wrote: post #17

This reminds me of Mischief (for Mac and PC) [1], which is incredibly fast vector drawing application. The way Mischief handles its details of graphics, speed and huge range of zoom is by using adaptively sampled distance fields (patented technology) [2]. It would be nice to know if Affinity Designer uses some advanced technology to achieve similar properties. [1] http://www.madewithmischief.com [2] http://www.cs.tuf…

Mischief is a neat program, but it's kind of the opposite of this program — Mischief pretends pixels don't exist, whereas this program has a lot of pixel-centric features.

Re: Affinity Designer – Illustrator alternative

#20

Post by Tloewald »

armandososa wrote: post #6
sbarre wrote: post #3

I wonder how this compares to Sketch? There seem to be a bunch of Mac-only vector apps coming out in recent years.. Not just these direct Illustrator competitors, but HTML5 animation tools too like Hype, Paintcode, etc.. that provide vector drawing and animation tools, and are coming from small teams and cost very little (relatively speaking)... Is this because there are more powerful native components in OS X that m…

In my humble opinion, as a 20 year user of vector software, Sketch sucks for drawing. It has very interesting features, mostly for UI/UX design work, but drawing anything mildly complicated is a nightmare. I'm excited to try Affinity (later today, whenever I have a chance) because their example drawings look very complicated and nuanced. …But maybe I am not a judge of good vector creative tools because I love Corel D…

Sketch is a bit nasty for freehand drawing. I'm very much not a Corel Draw fan, but loved Freehand when it was still around. Illustrator still lags Freehand of ten years ago in a lot of respects.

Affinity looks very promising.

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