Affinity designer software review free

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Affinity Designer is a graphic designing and UX solution that helps businesses create concept art, logos, icons, UI designs, print projects and mock-ups. Affinity Designer is a great one-time purchase software for graphic design. It has more features than the free program I was using previously and has allowed me.

Affinity Designer – Professional Graphic Design Software – Vector or raster, you decide

Any device, anywhere Whether on Windows, Mac or iPad, the file format is exactly the same. Rock solid vector tools Affinity Designer is full of tools meticulously developed for achieving high productivity, while maintaining percent accurate geometry. Powerful contour tool Effortlessly add a contour to any object or increase the width of single open curves. Advanced grids and guides The options you have for setting up grids and guides is almost unlimited.

Unlimited artboards Layout all your screens, pages, menus and other items in a single project across any number of artboards. Linked symbols Symbols allow you to include unlimited instances of the same base object across your project. Live pixel preview Pixel perfect designs are assured by viewing your work in pixel preview mode.

Sophisticated typography Whether working with artistic text for headlines, or frames of text for body copy, you can add advanced styling and ligatures with full control over leading, kerning, tracking and more.

Professional output for print, screen or collaboration Advanced file support is at the core of the back-end technology behind Affinity Designer. Although Affinity is a vector editor, it exports to PSD. Affinity Design is decent software with a great number of useful features, supporting many vector shapes and easily loading Ps brushes.

It is not convenient for specialists who have large libraries for these design elements. As we see, Serif developers are trying to satisfy the needs of their users. Affinity Designer features a pen tool, a library of brushes, and the ability to create custom brushes and set stroke options that will help achieve the desired results. Although this software is loved by design professionals, it still has some drawbacks.

For instance, it does not have an image tracing feature that will automatically turn a raster image into an editable one. You can do it manually, but this operation requires much time.

This program is more of a vector tool rather than a pixel one. In such a way, you may perform digital painting and slight photo touch-up in this vector software without the necessity to open photo editing programs. Affinity offers six photo filters. Moreover, it has 17 basic pre-made templates. It also features content-aware scaling, masking tools and perspective-based editing. If you have never used it before, watch this simple but effective Affinity Photo Workflow Video Course.

The software informs you if something might be weakly printed. The only difficulty is to find the setup functions since they are hidden in the Document Setup tab. Like no native way to permanently reset the bounding box of an object after it has been rotated, they have a toggle that works for 1 operation and switches back to the skewed or rotated original.

The align UI and the order of actions to chose what to align to what is strange and can waste time. Other minor things like that that I ran into, but all in all it works well and gets the job done. An affordable one-time fee for a product that’s just as good as illustrator. Works properly, has all the necessary features and is compatible with other software unlike Inkscape. After using Adobe products for years, I switched to Affinity products.

Initially it was cost driven, but once I tried it I loved it. I was able to open all my Adobe formats, but it all ran faster, and cleaner. It takes patience however! When you’re used to the Adobe solutions, you spend quite a bit of time trying to figure out the equal option.

However when you do, it is almost always there, and sometimes in a better way! Its quality: I have bought all the software that Affinity offers, I didn’t necessarily need it, but I didn’t want to miss out! The software is well designed and created. It is very responsive and fulfills pretty much every need. Compatibility: I appreciate the fact that Affinity software can open so many different formats in their respective areas. Being able to open and edit a PDF in publisher is a breeze.

Support: Support is faultless for me so far. The price: To be able to buy and own the software without a subscription is great. Its price is great when compared to its competition and its functionality matches and exceeds even the largest competitor in my opinion. Complexity: Not really a con, but there are some complex items. The software does provide some very deep options for what you’re trying to do. Once I google how to achieve something its a breeze after that.

Not enough products: Its like a delicious chocolate bar, you can never get enough : I look forward to what else this team produces. UX Software. Affinity Designer. Affinity Designer Reviews. Product Overview. Reviews are by default sorted by Recommended to software buyers, driven by our proprietary algorithm reflecting the depth and quality of the review, recency of experience, and other factors.

As a neutral reviews platform, the star rating of the review is not considered in the “Recommended” ranking, and there is currently no voting mechanism that would allow site visitors to influence the ranking. Most Recent. User Industry Accounting. Alternative Dispute Resolution. Alternative Medicine. Arts and Crafts. Broadcast Media. Building Materials. Business Supplies and Equipment. Capital Markets. Civil Engineering. Commercial Real Estate. Computer Games.

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Religious Institutions. Security and Investigations. His artwork has been exhibited across Bristol, and his words have also appeared in ImagineFX magazine. Sign in. Home Reviews Graphic Design. Our Verdict. For Excellent value Solid range of tools Interchangeable pixel and vector personas. Against Still no mesh fill or object warp No plugins or scripting No image tracing.

Join now. Join now Already have an account? Full view. Image 1 of 3 Affinity Designer layers. Value for money. Customer support. Showing 1 – 5 of reviews. Company size: employees.

Industry: Media Production. Time used: More than 2 years. Review Source: Capterra This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you. An Affordable Champion I’ve been looking for an alternative to Adobe illustrator for years now, and Affinity Designer is the one. Pros Affinity Designer is very inexpensive, but you wouldn’t know it from using it. Cons While Affinity Designer is very similar to Adobe Illustrator, it does behave quite differently in some ways, and will take a little longer to adjust coming from Illustrator.

Reasons for choosing Affinity Designer Much more professional interface than Gimp. Reasons for switching to Affinity Designer Very affordable, no monthly contract. Cons Nothing that I can think of at the moment, all is rainbows and smiles after few years of using it. Reasons for choosing Affinity Designer Pricing and plus I know the product for several years.

Reasons for switching to Affinity Designer Seamless and without any regrets, wouldn’t go back to Adobe in a million years.

Affinity designer software review free

I used their competitors programs but made the switch as soon as I saw how amazing it is. Real-time changes during designing and editing. Ability to work in vector or raster in the same application. Quick exporting with a preview and many options. Works amazingly on tablets and desktops.

Easy to download more brushes, typefaces, and anything else you need. Now integrated with copyright-free photo services like pixabay, pexles, and unsplash. Everything is fantastic and I cannot recommend this enough. Doesn’t like the corner tool at times. Wish Affinity had a cloud-like service that could download and keep files you’re working on available when you switch devices. Affinity does not have a subscription fee. Affinity Designer has all of the tools Illustrator has but they are fresh and better.

Affinity Designer has more options and is easier to use as well. Adobe is going downhill while their prices go up. The only reason I bought it and its product sibling, Affinity Photo was because the product I actually wanted Affinity Publisher has a component called “Studio Link” that allows owners of Designer and Photo to switch “personas,” which is a fancy word for summoning the tool set for Designer or Photo, whenever they need to update an image, logo, vector, landscape photo, etc.

By having a copy of Designer, I can use its full feature set right inside Publisher same with Photo. I never have to exit the program or swap the image file I need to work on. It’s not just innovative, it’s efficient: one of the functional reasons outside the obvious cost benefit to using Affinity Anything over Adobe Anything including Illustrator, it’s main competition.

But the funny thing is that once I bought Designer and Photo , I saw a need for it. The hardest part is actually learning how to draw with vectors. Spoiler Alert: It’s not hard, even if you’re an amateur like me. Get the Affinity Designer textbook or watch expert tutorials, and you’ll figure it out in no time. The main reason I bought the program was because it integrates with Affinity Publisher, another tool from the same company that I needed for book design.

This is probably more of a pro in Publisher’s camp, but Designer’s compatibility with Affinity’s entire suite of products made it attractive. But it didn’t take long for me to realize that I needed a program to design vector graphics, and Affinity Designer scratches that itch well. I can’t compare its feature set to its competitor, Adobe Illustrator, because I don’t use Adobe products, so I can’t discuss what it lacks. But when it comes to essential layered shape designs and special effects and creating patterns, and designing logos, and so on , it includes everything you need to get the job done well.

It’s also easy to use. The product’s store page also sells a textbook that holds your hand through designing projects, so it’s very learn-as-you-go. The video tutorials also offer quick tips and best practices, and you can get additional design ideas from Affinity’s YouTube channel.

The price is unbeatable. It charges an ownership fee, not a subscription fee, so you pay for the product once and depending on your budget, you don’t pay much and keep it forever. The price includes all updates within that version, and it updates enough to maintain user confidence. Overall, my opinion is that if you care about graphics of any kind, this is a tool worth having. But you should get all of Affinity’s products. They’re worth it. If I were a dedicated graphic design artist, I might have an opinion here.

But as a writer and sometimes game designer, my graphic needs are governed by situation, and so far my situation has not revealed any frustrations that I wouldn’t extend to all Affinity products. So, the only actual negative I have right now is trivial.

I’d need to use the software consistently to become excellent, and I don’t need it often enough to become excellent. But if I were to use it consistently, the tools it offers would help me become excellent. So, there’s no real con to buying this program, especially at its price point. Keeping track of the art boards gave me a headache the first time I used them. I think I may have used them wrong. A true graphic designer probably wouldn’t have that kind of problem.

It would be like a non-writer trying to learn how to use the style sheets in Microsoft Word or Affinity Publisher, for that matter. Not hopeless, but not easy on the first try. No, the only nitpick I have is the same about all of Affinity’s products.

To update them, you have to manually download and install the newest version. Each product is half a gigabyte in size. Multiply that by three because all three share the same updates , and it can get expensive on your hard drive if you don’t have that delete key ready.

It would be nicer if they had an auto-updating option available for those who trust the integrity of updates. But that’s about it. Oh, and Affinity likes RAM. Lots of RAM. When I saw what Affinity Designer and Photo and Publisher could accomplish as a complete design layout suite, and when I saw how little I had to spend to access such power, I couldn’t justify leaving it behind.

It was literally a case of “I don’t know if I can afford to buy this, but I do know that I can’t afford not buying it. And I could afford it. I’ve been using PaintShop Pro as an alternative to Adobe Photoshop for years, but I’ve always found the quality of the end result lacking in comparison.

But for more extensive work like compositing or typography two things I need to do to create a salable book cover , it shows its weaknesses. And regarding vector graphics, it’s about as basic as it gets. I’ve always appreciated PaintShop Pro’s price point, which is why I’ve justified upgrading every few years. But when I discovered I could buy a stronger and more capable program for even less, Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo, for that matter was a no-brainer purchase.

Thanks to the Affinity suite of products, I can’t justify using any other design tool for my needs, especially not for the cost. Industry: Information Technology and Services. We use Affinity Designer for a myriad of things – from designing logos and graphics for websites, to making merch design for our web comic.

The great UI and amazing performance are an upgrade from our previous vector design software. Affinity designer is the software I was waiting for as long as I remember. It has all the options of the mainstream competition, but for the fraction of the price. The best part of it is that Affinity Designer does what it does perfectly. But, the thing that attracted me to the Serif software, Affinity Designer and it’s sister products Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher, is not only that.

They offered their software for absolutely free for three entire months when the COVID pandemic started, and then for another three months later on. They were not only the best, but the most human and kind. And that is the kind of company I want to give my money to. The affordable price and the completeness of the package were the middle ground between the expensive and the free option we were looking at.

We switched to Affinity software because we fell in love with the companies spirit. They offered their product for free to those who needed it the most. Needless to say, we bought the full suite after just a few days of use. Discovering Affinity was, to me, as exciting as making my first steps in vector design years ago.

Overall, I recommend Designer, along with the other Affinity apps, but I have something of a love-hate relationship with them. I love that we have real alternative to Adobe’s products. The tools are powerful, and in many areas they shine brighter than Adobe’s tired old offerings.

On the other hand, some basic usability issues seem to hang about forever. It’s almost impossible to judge any vector illustration software without drawing comparisons excuse the pun to Adobe Illustrator, and in many ways Affinity Designer compares very well. It certainly feels fast, as a modern, native Mac app should. And unlike Illustrator, you can buy the app for a very affordable one-time purchase—no monthly subscriptions.

Affinity has done a great job of unifying mostly all their apps, and this has to be mentioned too—Designer exists as part of an ecosystem, which for many designers, makes it the first genuine alternative to Adobe’s Creative Cloud. I have not found the transition from Adobe apps to be an altogether easy one. In some part, that is just the nature of switching from tools that one has grown very familiar with over many years.

But some of it goes beyond that. Some of these issues have been raised over and over again on the user forums, but Affinity seems very slow to address them. The ability to create and edit files in one and seamlessly switch to the other e.

I create several print-ready images every month and used to pay a LOT more for CC, which started to become a burden. Switching to Affinity saves me a lot of money and also time. Not a complaint, but if this software could somehow use all of the thousands of Photoshop plugins and filters out there, it would be incredible. Mostly price. I also did not like all of the additional drivers and misc stuff that Adobe installed and keeps running all the time in the background.

I love this tool for graphic design. The learning curve is short, the tool itself is inexpensive no recurring cost and I look forward to use it on a daily basis – it’s so intutive. This software can be bought for a low price one-time unlike Adoble Illustrator which demands you pay monthly license fee.

The software is easy and intutive to use and I was able to learn the essentials within a week or so. You get basic photo editing features like selection tools for cropping, blending modes, etc. Certain useful features like gradient map, 3D, mockups, etc. But I am OK with this – too many features make us forget essential ones. Besides, the magic wand tool available in Affinity Photo is not available in Affinity Designer – for precise cropping of people, etc.

I wish Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo were a single software. I know Inkscape is free, but Affinity Designer has an awesome community on Facebook. I love the energy and enthusiasm around this product. Affinity designer is super cost-effective. They have a lot of support on their website and tutorials on YouTube.

The program tends to frequently close out by itself. I think it needs a little more work and to be easier to use. I saw ads for the Affinity suite in the past, but always dismissed them as one of those half-baked knock-offs of photoshop that like to rope you in with “free”trials that don’t let you save your files or something.

Turns out I was very wrong! Affinity Designer and Publisher are both legitimate and very good pieces of software. They are feature rich, have some innovative features that aren’t seen in other software and have ongoing development with regular updates. Affinity Designer is quite intuitive, can do most things Illustrator can, can open and edit Illustrator files, so the transition was very smooth, with hardly any learning curve. Still had to google some to to figure out how certain operations were done in Designer that were different to Illustrator, and grapple with a few odd choices the devs made, over all I’ve been pretty pleased with Designer.

Decided to transition from Illustrator because it didn’t make sense for us to pay for the subscription model because we only need to use it several times a year for creating product labels, and starting and cancelling subscriptions constantly is just cumbersome. Plus we already have a Photoshop and Lightroom subscription. I tried to move from Illustrator to Inkscape in the past, but that was just impossible, Inkscape can’t open Illustrator files properly even PDFs and lacks so many features that it wasn’t possible to use for what I needed it.

Coming from Illustrator, it’s very easy to adapt to, just minor differences in some workflows, but mostly it’s intuitive. It can open and edit Illustrator files if they are pdf compatible, even deal with complex things like knockout groups correctly.

It’s also has some great ideas that I was pleasantly surprised by that made the workflow better and faster. Affinity devs listen to user feedback and regularly update their apps, so any features that it lacks it will probably get soon. Lack of a good font manager, it just takes the fonts you have installed in your OS. No Google fonts integration or anything like Adobe Fonts, so if you’re missing fonts you have to manually find them online and buy or download them the old-fashioned way.

Some odd workflow choices, minor things that can slow you down. Like no native way to permanently reset the bounding box of an object after it has been rotated, they have a toggle that works for 1 operation and switches back to the skewed or rotated original. The align UI and the order of actions to chose what to align to what is strange and can waste time. Other minor things like that that I ran into, but all in all it works well and gets the job done. An affordable one-time fee for a product that’s just as good as illustrator.

Works properly, has all the necessary features and is compatible with other software unlike Inkscape. After using Adobe products for years, I switched to Affinity products. Initially it was cost driven, but once I tried it I loved it. I was able to open all my Adobe formats, but it all ran faster, and cleaner. It takes patience however! When you’re used to the Adobe solutions, you spend quite a bit of time trying to figure out the equal option. However when you do, it is almost always there, and sometimes in a better way!

Its quality: I have bought all the software that Affinity offers, I didn’t necessarily need it, but I didn’t want to miss out! The software is well designed and created. It is very responsive and fulfills pretty much every need. Compatibility: I appreciate the fact that Affinity software can open so many different formats in their respective areas. Being able to open and edit a PDF in publisher is a breeze. Support: Support is faultless for me so far. The price: To be able to buy and own the software without a subscription is great.

Its price is great when compared to its competition and its functionality matches and exceeds even the largest competitor in my opinion. Complexity: Not really a con, but there are some complex items. The software does provide some very deep options for what you’re trying to do. Once I google how to achieve something its a breeze after that. Not enough products: Its like a delicious chocolate bar, you can never get enough : I look forward to what else this team produces.

UX Software. Affinity Designer. Affinity Designer Reviews. Product Overview. Reviews are by default sorted by Recommended to software buyers, driven by our proprietary algorithm reflecting the depth and quality of the review, recency of experience, and other factors. As a neutral reviews platform, the star rating of the review is not considered in the “Recommended” ranking, and there is currently no voting mechanism that would allow site visitors to influence the ranking.

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An Affordable Champion I’ve been looking for an alternative to Adobe illustrator for years now, and Affinity Designer is the one. The most loved aspect of Affinity Designer apart from the one-time-pay system is the Personas toggle. The value in this toggle is that designers can switch from a vector workspace to a pixel workspace with one click. Designer Persona is the default workspace to create vector graphics. The workspace for the designer persona has tools for drawing shapes and curves, vector brushes, fill and stroke options, transparency controls, and place and crop tools for images.

The Designer Persona is the most similar to Adobe Illustrator. A significant tool in both personas is the Pixel Preview button. This viewing tools instantly shows you how a vector graphic would look as a raster graphic in both normal and retina screens. Pixel Persona is a raster workspace with tools that resemble Photoshop tools. There are different shape marquee tools, a freehand selection tool, artistic pixel brushes, an eraser, a pixel tool which set solitary pixels on the canvas.

Apart from those, there are also photo manipulation tools like dodge, burn, smudge, blur, and sharpen. The brush tool in the Pixel Persona comes with many artistic brush options. This feature on its own has made Affinity Designer a favorite with digital painters and artists. Export Persona is a space where designers can select areas of their canvas and export as new graphics. Affinity Designer has a powerful iPad version with almost the same tools as the desktop version.

The Affinity Designer iPad has to be purchased separately from the desktop App. Once both are set up and you are logged in, the platforms communicate with each other so projects are updated seamlessly on desktop and iPad. If on the other hand, if we compare the Affinity Designer iPad App to Procreate for iPad, each has their own strengths and weaknesses. Both are amazing for illustrators and digital artists and it really comes down to a personal preference.

All in all, Affinity Designer is a rockstar alternative to Adobe Illustrator. Nevertheless, Affinity designer has a few cons in comparison to Adobe Illustrator. As part of our Affinity Designer review, here is a list of the pros and cons for Affinity Designer for Desktop and iPad. Affinity Designer is perfect for illustrators and graphic designers who regularly work with vector graphics and raster images at the same time.

There are lots of interestings effects which can be achieved by using both personas at the same time. If as a designer, you work with clients that are always asking for Adoibe Illustrator source files, then Affinity Designer will not be of great help.

In this Affinity Designer review we showed you the basic ins and outs of the software to give you an idea of what the program can do. In conclusion, Affinity Designer is a great software for designers, illustrators and digital artists. Not only as an alternative to Adobe Illustrator, but also on its own. Since the software has a one-time-pay, it is much more accessible.

All Affinity software have a one week free trial if you want to try them out for yourself before committing to the purchase. Affinity Designer: An Overview and Review.