Affinity Designer Is A Low Cost Illustrator Alternative
by Margaret Penney | October 19, 2016
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—you 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.  Right now they are offering a special appealing to web designers—you get 20% off as well and the Grade UI kit for $58.
Until recently Affinity Designer was only available for MAC, 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 a former Managing Editor of Notes on Design. Margaret is a teacher, designer, writer and new media artist and founder of Hello Creative Co. Read more articles by Margaret.
For creatives seeking a thorough training in illustration and graphic design, Sessions College offers accredited fully online illustration certificate and illustration degree programs. Contact Admissions for more information.Â
Recent Articles