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Comment by jvm | Hacker News Reader

I ran into this issue and ended up using Affinity Designer. I was pleasantly surprised, it's actually quite comparable to Adobe Illustrator. It's not open source but at $50 much more reasonable than Adobe.

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I second this. I've been using Affinity Designer for posters, UI mock-ups, icons, etc. Honestly, I can't use Inkscape at all. I find the interface highly bloated and the whole application generally slow.

How does Designer compare to Illustrator feature wise, and as far a usability? We already have Illustrator. Is it worth adding Designer?

I use the two side by side. At times I've found Designer's SVG support actually worked better than Illustrator. Illustrator is definitely faster but there are quite a number of useful pixel/recolouring features in Designer. Generally though the maturity and advanced features (mesh, isolate edit, Pathfinder!) eclipse what Designer brings to the table.

I was a long time Fireworks holdout, and Designer is maybe the closest in feel compared to Sketch or Illustrator (and they're copying each other better now).

All said, the bang for buck is great though, and UI is way easier than Inkscape I gotta say ;)

Just another data point: to me Affinity Designer actually seems to render much faster than Adobe Illustrator (on a 2015 Macbook Pro with Intel integrated graphics chipset).

Thanks for this: I didn't know about Designer, and was similarly let down by how less pleasant Inkscape was on Mac, coming from a lovely experience of it on Windows.

On Affinity Designer's site the price is $39.99, so even more reasonable.

20% off for a while with the launch of Affinity Photo for iPad at Apple's WWDC last week.

Affinity Designer development seems to have stalled. There are many requests for features that have been accepted but untouched for a year or two. My current showstopper: export to DXF.

Are you playing with a cheap laser engraver off ebay?

I don't feel that "stalled" this is correct at all. They had a massive feature update via 1.5 in Oct. and 1.6 entered customer beta in May.

They just haven't shipped your preferred feature.

Ye gods, someone's pet peeve hasn't been touched in a year, and that means development has "stalled". Young people today.

Do you have any idea how long Illustrator users had to wait for artboards to land?

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