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Affinity Designer – Illustrator alternative

affinity.serif.com

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Re: Affinity Designer – Illustrator alternative

#32

Post by ou812 »

Osmium wrote: post #21

I'm looking for something with solid EPS import and export. So far, I've found Sketch flakey (some things imported incorrectly, other things cause visual glitches), OmniGraffle great except when I export a document as EPS which has other EPS-imported elements embedded in it, they appear to be rasterised (which defeats the point). And that's pretty much it–Pixelmator, despite becoming more of a vector tool, doesn't su…

There is a new experimental build of inkscape for osx which is slightly less awkward. Search for 'inkscape osx menu', it has been stable for me and you don't need to install an x server.

Re: Affinity Designer – Illustrator alternative

#35

Post by TheZenPsycho »

Tloewald wrote: post #20
armandososa wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting. What did freehand have that illustrator does not?

Re: Affinity Designer – Illustrator alternative

#36

Post by cageface »

I'm very happy to see new alternatives to Illustrator and Photoshop emerge because they are both terrible tools for interface design.

Maybe I'm missing something but basic snapping doesn't seem to be working very well in this beta. With snapping enabled I still can't seem to easily draw rectangles that snap tightly to grid lines. I get locations that are all over the map instead. Sketch used to have this problem as well but they finally fixed it in version 3 and it was extremely frustrating to use for UI design before this was fixed.

So unless I'm missing something this is going to sit on the shelf until they get snapping really nailed down. Looks nice otherwise.

Re: Affinity Designer – Illustrator alternative

#37

Post by cageface »

nyar wrote: post #14

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.

I suspect that the reason that apps like this and Sketch are Mac-only is that the OS X provides APIs like Quartz and CoreGraphics that do a lot of the heavy lifting for drawing apps. So there's a lot less code to write for an app like this.

Re: Affinity Designer – Illustrator alternative

#40

Post by adamredwoods »

mike_ivanov wrote: post #24
nyar wrote: post #14

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.

If you're looking for a Windows alternative, Xara is still hanging around.

Inkscape! http://www.inkscape.org/en/ With the "use space to pan" option, it works just as well as Illustrator. Highly recommended!
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