Affinity Designer

I've been looking for an alternative to Adobe illustrator for years now, and Affinity Designer is the one. The interface is much faster to open and lighter in feel, and it offers pretty much all the features one could want from a vector editor. You can jump between vector and raster quite easily too.

I am very satisfied with the performance the look, style and usability of Affinity Designer I am also using the Affinity Photo and Publisher.

Not really a finished app

I have been trying to integrate Affinity Designer into a professional workflow for a number of years now but I've come to the conclusion that it's just too painful and there is nothing to indicate that this will improve.

Back when I first purchased this app the developers were promising a roadmap of future improvements which would bring it closer to some of the industry-standard vector apps out there. It's been two years now and not a single thing on that list has been implemented. The few updates which have come down the line have focused on things like the app icon.

The developers have moved on to other projects, and it seems to me that for all intents and purposes, development on this software has been abandoned. I wouldn't wish to speculate if this software will even be supported in a few years.

So we're left with an app which lacks some of the most fundamental vector editing tools. With the exception of skew, vectors cannot be distorted in any way (including perspective) and it even lacks a knife tool. These are tools which are actually provided by many free editors.

Furthermore, many tools are very poorly implemented. Convert to curves produces hilariously unusable results and things like Offset Path simply don't exist. The developers themselves are notoriously unresponsive to please for further development.

Since going cross-platform there have been many reports of Designer's instability and since the implementation of Apples Metal API

I use Affinity Designer on a daily basis, to create graphics and assets for video and animation, as well as all the graphic design needs for my job. Strongly support the vision and accessibility of Affinity compared to the Adobe rent software model. Love the fact that all updates are also free and they just keep on improving, you go Affinity.

My experience with Affinity Designer has been great. I am a professional writer and only use graphic design and photo editing software a few times per month. I kept Adobe CS6 until it was no longer supported, and then moved to an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription for a year. It wasn't worth the money for me considering how infrequently I used it. Affinity Illustrator and Photo have allowed me to cancel my Adobe subscription, and have a full-featured graphic design program which covers 95% of all my needs. For the price, there is not a better option anywhere!