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Affinity Designer – Illustrator alternative

153 pointsby oulipianalmost 11 years ago

26 comments

teiloalmost 11 years ago
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.)<p>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&#x27;m going to manage that, however, as we are already in &quot;special deal&quot; territory.<p>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&#x27;t get their head out of their rear end, we will be buying less software from them, not more.
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sbarrealmost 11 years ago
I wonder how this compares to Sketch?<p>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)...<p>Is this because there are more powerful native components in OS X that make it easy&#x2F;easier to build this kind of application now?<p>Or did the whole Adobe thing just reach a critical mass of disgruntled-ness and this is the result?
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Osmiumalmost 11 years ago
I&#x27;m looking for something with solid EPS import and export. So far, I&#x27;ve found Sketch flakey (some things imported incorrectly, other things cause visual glitches), OmniGraffle great <i>except</i> 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&#x27;s pretty much it–Pixelmator, despite becoming more of a vector tool, doesn&#x27;t support EPS at all. Inkscape works flawlessly except that it&#x27;s awkward to use on a Mac, especially without retina support (which is somewhat crucial for an graphic editor).<p>I&#x27;ve just tried Affinity Designer and it seems like it has good EPS import support (all elements editable etc.) and EPS export, but the exported EPS appears rasterised. When I open it up again in Affinity Designer, it&#x27;s no longer editable. But maybe I&#x27;m just doing something wrong...
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pavlovalmost 11 years ago
Serif, the company behind this product, was founded in 1987. It&#x27;s cool to see innovative new products from people who have been around for a while.<p>In the software business, too many companies older than a decade just end up milking their installed base forever with lame feature upgrades wrapped in an ancient GUI.
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airlocksoftwarealmost 11 years ago
Just tried out the beta. I can&#x27;t import Adobe Illustrator files yet (their forums says this is coming later). But otherwise it seems like a pretty good replacement. The panning and zooming is much better that AI. You can also use keyboard arrows to scroll through fonts and it shows up immediately, which is another thing about AI that has always annoyed me. I don&#x27;t see any support for scripting (which I like to use to export icons), but it is a beta.
buro9almost 11 years ago
This looks great, but... Mac only. I really long for a tool like this for Linux.
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heldridaalmost 11 years ago
Looks good, but unfortunately I&#x27;m on Ubuntu, may use Win on a VM, but that&#x27;s it! Such a pitty there&#x27;s so many new tools like this coming out, but just for Mac. £37 is affordable
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cagefacealmost 11 years ago
I&#x27;m very happy to see new alternatives to Illustrator and Photoshop emerge because they are both terrible tools for interface design.<p>Maybe I&#x27;m missing something but basic snapping doesn&#x27;t seem to be working very well in this beta. With snapping enabled I still can&#x27;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.<p>So unless I&#x27;m missing something this is going to sit on the shelf until they get snapping really nailed down. Looks nice otherwise.
gulpahumalmost 11 years ago
This reminds me of Mischief (for Mac and PC) [1], which is incredibly fast vector drawing application.<p>The way Mischief handles its details of graphics, speed and huge range of zoom is by using adaptively sampled distance fields (patented technology) [2].<p>It would be nice to know if Affinity Designer uses some advanced technology to achieve similar properties.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.madewithmischief.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.madewithmischief.com</a> [2] <a href="http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~frisken/frisken.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.tufts.edu&#x2F;~frisken&#x2F;frisken.html</a>
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danboarderalmost 11 years ago
I am excited to see more application options in this space. Adobe has achieved a monopoly in creative circles with their applications, specifically Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign (and for a long time Flash and Acrobat as well). Flash is a great tool but the format was never really opened to other applications and now it&#x27;s losing to HTML5. I do credit Adobe for opening up the PDF format, and it would be great if more standard formats could win out regardless of the application that created them.
graphixgeekalmost 11 years ago
In the long run, as has been pointed out, the rise of a lot of graphic software packages at this particular juncture has everything to do Adobe&#x27;s current subscription model. Like many designers, I&#x27;m still forced to use Adobe at work because it is being advocated as &quot;the industry standard.&quot;<p>At home, however, I&#x27;ve spent the last year looking for alternatives to InDesign and Illustrator. Ironically, the best two that were found were QuarkXPress (expensive, but had most of the features to equal what was being done in InDesign) and PagePlus, which was the one chosen (granted, it has to be either in a dual boot or in a virtual windows environment, but it does the job).<p>The problem when the Affinity Suite--most notably Affinity Publisher--finally comes to market is going to be getting commercial print shops to take their native files. Most shops work with hi-res PDFs now anyway, but for that 5-10% of jobs that need to be corrected within the native file(s), the shops are going to need to be able to open the file format. Currently, most professional print shops (in the states) take InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, PDF, QuarkXpress, and sometimes Freehand, Microsoft Publisher and CorelDraw files.<p>I submit two thoughts:<p>1) Affinity will need to allow Publisher to import and&#x2F;or export .idml files so that previous users of InDesign can use their files in Publisher (the open-source program, Scribus, claims to have achieved .idml import currently in version 1.5 which is a developmental build) and export to an interim native file format that the commercial printing world can work with.<p>2) Affinity will need to go on a massive marketing campaign targeting printing vendors and extolling the virtues of adding Publisher to their armory of tools.<p>Having said all that--and currently being a PagePlus and DrawPlus customer as well as a proponent of the Designer beta--I can&#x27;t wait until Affinity kicks Adobe&#x27;s a$$.<p>By the way, as a Sketch user, Bohemian Coding&#x27;s app seems to have been made to compete directly with Fireworks. Although it does work in vector, Sketch does not have the chops to fully compete with Illustrator (which is the territory that Designer fully stands in now). The only app that could have made that claim on OS X is&#x2F;was Freehand (as DrawPlus, CorelDraw, Canvas, and Xara are all currently Windows-only).
_random_almost 11 years ago
How about adding Mac-only to title?
callumprenticealmost 11 years ago
Pixelmator (in Vectormator mode) and iDraw are pretty amazing for my modest needs. Looking forward to seeing what else this can do.
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wsc981almost 11 years ago
I&#x27;ve been looking for an affordable Adobe Illustrator version for quite a while. I really hope this app will fill the gap that Adobe neglected (why is there a Photoshop Elements and no Illustrator Elements?)<p>As others have noted, tools like Pixelmater, Sketch and Inkscape each have their own problems, making them an unsuitable Illustrator replacement.
safetydankalmost 11 years ago
Serif has had a solid Windows vector drawing app (DrawPlus) for a long time. If I remember correctly, a group of ex-Xara developers moved to Serif to write it. Affinity looks similar, I would be surprised if they aren&#x27;t based on the same codebase.
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donparkalmost 11 years ago
Played with the beta for only 10 min but I was impressed with it. Easier and faster than Illustrator. Felt much less buggy than Sketch 3. AI file compatibility is a concern but looks very promising.
8bitheroalmost 11 years ago
Again, no love for Linux :(
joeyspnalmost 11 years ago
Pretty neat. I just tested it and feels quite smooth (less buggy and resource-hungry than illustrator). I&#x27;ll stick to my CS, but I&#x27;ll give it ago for some new projects...
teiloalmost 11 years ago
Link to the beta download page: <a href="https://affinity.serif.com/beta-download/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;affinity.serif.com&#x2F;beta-download&#x2F;</a>
jwattealmost 11 years ago
Illustrator needs disruption, true. But Photoshop needs disrupt even more! (And don&#x27;t get me started on only two computers for the full subscription install!)
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rodgerdalmost 11 years ago
I&#x27;d give a lot for a Freehand alternative - I never really cottoned on to the Illustrator way of drawing.
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wldcordeiroalmost 11 years ago
I actually like Illustrator a lot and can&#x27;t see this or even Inkscape as actual alternatives to it.
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Kiroalmost 11 years ago
Is this good for making game graphics? I tried Sketch but it was not suited for the task at all.
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microcolonelalmost 11 years ago
Although surely inferiour in some ways for now, Inkscape is more useful to me because it&#x27;s open and runs on all of my computers, it also has a usable plugin system, a userbase...<p>Thanks, but no thanks.
thisjepisjealmost 11 years ago
It&#x27;s funny how some mac apps mention they support &quot;full screen&quot; as if it&#x27;s something nontrivial.
nyaralmost 11 years ago
It isn&#x27;t an alternative.<p>Illustrator runs on Windows and Mac, this runs on Mac. I don&#x27;t have a mac, nor do I want one, so this is unusable.<p>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.
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