Affinity Designer Is A Low Cost Illustrator Alternative

by Margaret Penney | October 19, 2016

If you haven’t heard, Affinity Designer is a vector-based app that truly gives Adobe Illustrator a run for its money. Designed by Serif out of the UK, Affinity Designer has been created by designers for designers and holds a variety of features that are smartly chosen and super useful for creatives.聽Affinity Designer essentially functions like an Illustrator and Photoshop hybrid, bringing in features from both apps. Whether you are a branding, print, web, or package designer, Affinity Designer has something for you.

The interface design has a familiarity to it that most people will like. Affinity Designer looks like an Adobe product, and that’s good. Smart, intuitive and well-organized, creatives will have no problem adapting to working in the Affinity Designer environment.

Affinity Designer provides a compatible app as well. It supports a large collection of file types like EPS, PDF, PNG, TIFF, and GIF for import and export. File conversion is also simple鈥攜ou can open a PSD, AI, or EPS file and edit them right from within Affinity Designer. While saving back to AI format isn’t a feature, you can save anything you are working on as a PSD.

Perhaps most importantly, Affinity Designer is affordable, it costs $39.99 to buy and you’re not tied into a subscription with this app. 聽Right now they are offering a special appealing to web designers鈥攜ou get 20% off as well and the Grade UI kit for $58.

Until recently Affinity Designer was only available for MAC,聽however, they have recently released a Beta Windows version, which you can download here.

Here Is Why Affinity Designer Stands Out

Affinity Designer supports a wide color space including RGB, CMYK, Lab, Grayscale and Pantone.
You can Zoom over 1,000,000%, which makes creating refined design work much easier.
Adjustments and effects are non-destructive. You can apply as many effects as you like and still revert back to your original.
A huge library of adjustment layers, effects and blend modes you can apply to masks and clipping layers.
Custom workspaces for many kinds of projects.
A fun, useful and comprehensive shape library and shapes you can adjust and modify with easy-to-understand controls.
Refined typographic control and text styles.
Powerful artboards designed with responsive and app design in mind.
Support for Symbols. You can make one instance of an object, like a button, use it across a project, but have to change it only once.

Margaret Penney is the Managing Editor of Notes on Design. Margaret is a teacher, designer, writer and new media artist and founder of Hello Creative Co.

For creatives聽seeking a聽thorough training聽in illustration and graphic design,聽Sessions College offers accredited fully聽 online聽illustration聽certificate and illustration聽degree聽programs.聽Contact Admissions for more information.聽

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