Affinity Designer – Illustrator alternative
affinity.serif.com
affinity.serif.com
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'm going to manage that, however, as we are already in "special deal" territory.
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't get their head out of their rear end, we will be buying less software from them, not more.
Their Launchpad page says
>"Inkscape has 122 active branches owned by 62 people and 6 teams. There were 188 commits by 16 people in the last month."
Just because there's no price tag on it doesn't mean it's not for sale?!?
I have seen Affinity Designer put forward as a page layout competitor also, but this is naive. Just regarding color alone, it would need to be able to support multiple colorspaces in a single document and retain them in the resulting PDF. In the world of modern RIPs and digital printing, the RIP often handles colorspace conversion. Thus it is common to leave your source material in its original colorspace and tag the individual objects in a PDF with profiles.
And don't even get me started on how bad type is in the open source world (No, TeX is not an option in print).
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)...
Is this because there are more powerful native components in OS X that make it easy/easier to build this kind of application now?
Or did the whole Adobe thing just reach a critical mass of disgruntled-ness and this is the result?
Really interested to see if this works. Most indie vector apps have not been ready for production use.
Since they're not playing straight, here's the direct download so you don't have to give them your personal info:
I could've included the current state of the AI/PDF import in the version you have - but it isn't ready yet, so instead of 'it doesn't import AI files' the comments would be 'AI files don't import properly' or 'why doesn't this attribute work?' because people may assume it's finished.
The personal info we ask for is nothing except an email address and your name so that we can send out updates about new betas - complete with an unsubscribe link.
This is a work-in-progress and it is very quickly evolving :)
We can't expect users to keep checking back on the website to see if we've added any new features that we always knew were going to be in the finished product but hadn't listed, just because they weren't finished yet, surely?
It's a sales site, deep down we understand why you did what you did and why you say what you say. We have all done it in the past. But there is always that dick that wants to pick a bone.
Don't worry about it. Though I would probably try be abit more upfront about the beta and the limitations of the beta at the download phase. After you have collected email addresses etc just let the user know this is indeed beta software and it's missing x, y and z.
Considering your early adopters are going to be more adventurous.. then it might make sense to post detailed release notes. This serves a double purpose. It means you are upfront with your current users (likely to be your first paid customers) and it sets the tone for open communication.
Said tone is awfully important. It's the difference between "I'll report this bug and it will probably be fixed 2 weeks from now" and "F$#k it, these guys don't give a sh*t". Not to say the latter will necessarily happen but only that tone counts for alot when you are selling a tool that peoples livelihood may very well depend upon.
Best of luck anyways. I love working with graphics on the Mac and think your product is a welcome addition.
That said hey I'm certainly willing to give this one a try and drop some notes on them as to what my particular dealbreakers turn out to be. I'm betting it'll lack global color swatches, I've never seen anything besides AI do those and I love it.
…But maybe I am not a judge of good vector creative tools because I love Corel Draw and I miss it so very much since I switched to Mac.
Affinity looks very promising.
Illustrator today has far more functionality (largely borrowed from Photoshop) than Freehand did, but Freehand had better core functionality than Illustrator (and it also introduced many of the features now in Illustrator, e.g. booleans).
Actually, if you're curious, just google freehand vs. illustrator -- it's pretty depressing how they compare despite freehand being 10 years old.
e.g.
So it isn't just me then. I just downloaded Affinity and within 10 minutes was as productive for core drawing tasks than I am in Sketch. Of course I miss the artboards and would like to see arbitrary export sizes (@0.5x etc.)
Great tool so far. I'm looking forward to using it more.
And I hate the rounded corners options in the size panel now.
When we started out Adobe was still sticking to their Flash guns. As HTML5 was the only method to make animated web content on iOS, it was clear someone needed to make tools aimed at graphic designers, so we decided that someone should be us! Luckily with no other competing apps around, we didn't have to deal with an uphill battle on feature parity unlike these vector editors do with Illustrator. So I wouldn't say we were disgruntled, just trying to fill in a hole. And, on a personal note I had a need for such a tool for a side project I was working on.
OS X is a great platform to develop for generally speaking. We naturally leverage WebKit, and Quartz and CoreImage frameworks I'm sure do a lot of heavy lifting for the vector-based tools. Also keep in mind a larger percent of graphic pros use a Mac than the general population, so if you're building a tool it is a safe bet to start on the Mac.
I do wonder though, how many people do you get asking for you to support Windows? I know alot of Adobe shops that adopted Windows in previous years so I am just curious what the numbers are like.
We get maybe 2-3 requests a week for Hype on Windows. My napkin math estimates of potential customers (those that don't write in or saw our FAQ, and then would go on to buy) shows this might lead to lower double-digit percent income coming from a Windows port. This roughly corresponds with our site traffic, which is 18% Windows users.
My general thought is (at this time) we’d do better to develop enticing new features to expand our user base than doing a Windows/web port.
Sketch is focussed on UI designers. Affinity is focussed on illustrators. Different markets, with some overlap. In many ways, within the Adobe suite, Sketch is closer to Fireworks than Illustrator.
I think part of the reason you're seeing a bit of an explosion in apps, in addition to the general digruntled-ness with Adobe, is that Illustrator is one of those apps that is serving many different markets — not all of them well.
I'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's no longer editable. But maybe I'm just doing something wrong...
Does ElementaryOS support retina? It works well as a dual boot!
Publisher requirement. It seems to be preferred for print work.
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.
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.
The way Mischief handles its details of graphics, speed and huge range of zoom is by using adaptively sampled distance fields (patented technology) [2].
It would be nice to know if Affinity Designer uses some advanced technology to achieve similar properties.
[1] http://www.madewithmischief.com [2] http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~frisken/frisken.html
At home, however, I'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).
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.
I submit two thoughts:
1) Affinity will need to allow Publisher to import and/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.
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.
Having said all that--and currently being a PagePlus and DrawPlus customer as well as a proponent of the Designer beta--I can't wait until Affinity kicks Adobe's a$$.
By the way, as a Sketch user, Bohemian Coding'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/was Freehand (as DrawPlus, CorelDraw, Canvas, and Xara are all currently Windows-only).
As others have noted, tools like Pixelmater, Sketch and Inkscape each have their own problems, making them an unsuitable Illustrator replacement.
You're right that some Xara devs added to DrawPlus over the years, but the Affinity titles are fr fr fresh and have different goals and philosophy.
Also there are a fuckton of people trying to disrupt PS but very few stabs at Illustrator.
It's mildly amusing this is back to Mac-only territory, given that the reason things like Xara were Windows only in the mid 90s was the logic of the era was design and publishing was going to become a Windows NT stronghold, which underestimated the stickiness of custom AppleScript and Quark XTensions.
Last I checked, Microsoft were still offering both Windows and Mac versions as free downloads. The Mac version doesn't work on modern OSX, but the Windows version is awesome - and it works perfectly on WINE too.
Note that this is professional software, with an 'appropriate' learning curve. I love the user interface. The manual is friendly, comprehensive, and very well illustrated.
Could you elaborate why Sketch didn't work out for you?
Thanks, but no thanks.
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.
Saying that this is only an alternative on a Mac is not trolling, not a strawman, and not an error, it's a clarification that people looking at thread titles to click on might appreciate. You're either a troll, or you're an idiot, and I'm honestly curious which, because I would like to assume the former, but your post makes no sense, even as a troll message. What was your motivation?
Illustrator runs on Windows and Mac, this runs on PC. I don't have a PC, nor do I want one, so this is unusable. Now tell me about how design has to be done on a and how the MS operating system on the computer helps you do it.
(Tongue firmly in cheek...)
By the way, nice app!