Frank's Dead. Time For Affinity

scotty

scotty

Ultimate Member
Frank (Frankenstein) my old 2006 17" Macbook Pro has finally and sadly given up the ghost and gone to the Apple Store in the sky.
I called him Frankenstein because he was cobbled together out of donor parts to keep him going.
Frank and I had some really good times together over the years.

Anyhow. Not to dwell in sadness, it's given me the chance to get another Macbook and the opportunity to try out Affinity Designer out at long last which I'm quite looking forward to.

Hope it's as good as they say it is. :D
 
The Affinity stroke tool is amazing, you can adjust the thickness of a line at different points using a graph. Makes fiddly jobs soooo much quicker and easier.
 
Hey Paul, I'm seriously thinking about Affinity before going down the Adobe subscription route. Do you use it solely instead of Ai, and will it replace what
Photoshop does for me too, as I spend most of my time in there?

Scotty, hurry up and tell us what you think of it, I need an illustrator's opinion too! :)
 
Wardy said:
Hey Paul, I'm seriously thinking about Affinity before going down the Adobe subscription route. Do you use it solely instead of Ai, and will it replace what
Photoshop does for me too, as I spend most of my time in there?
Click to expand...


I use it probably 99% of the times I would need to use vector software. The only time I use Illustrator is if I'm working with files that have been sent in Illustrator format, or if I know I'll need to supply design files to someone else. So far I've had no crashes, save for one instance where a reboot solved the problem. Illustrator seems to crash at least once a day, often when I'm saving, but more likely just at random intervals.

For a Photoshop replacement, check out Affinity Photo, though this is more for image editing than Illustration, it does still support brushes, etc. Check out the video, it's pretty magical.

 
That looks great.

Are you still having problems with your old imac, I'm in the same boat I think?
 
I replaced my iMac with a 15" MBP a few months back. It runs a lot better but Illustrator still seems incredibly unstable for a professional SaaS package.
 
In Designer - how to see the bleed like you would in InDesign or Illustrator? And if I have a PSD placed - how do I see it's effective resolution?

What about viewing separations?
 
My "new to me, emergency Macbook" should come tomorrow and I'm going to get Affinity as soon as.

From the reviews I've seen its often described as "like Ai but better".
Ai is the tool I use but I've never really liked it and I HATE how Adobe have the monopoly and tie people in to subscriptions.
 
Being playing around with the Beta for Windows. It's pretty good.

A few things annoying me - no separations - and no bleed margin guides.

I also applied some text effects to a test piece of text, and exported to PDF and it came out as normal looking black text. I had to tweak around the settings to get the text to export as per the effects. Not a big deal.
 
It would have to come up with something like Live Trace for it to replace Ai for me, I use it
a lot for bottom end stuff.
 
A roadmap is basically a to-do list with dates attached. The Affinity devs are actually pretty good at listening to feature requests :)
 
Got Affinity and only just taken a quick look at it.
Seems pretty intuitive to use and even after just a few min's I'm finding some nice features the Ai should have.

Game changer me thinks. :D
 
Wardy said:
It would have to come up with something like Live Trace for it to replace Ai for me, I use it
a lot for bottom end stuff.
Click to expand...

I don't use Live Trace too much but when I used it in CC I noticed they seemed to have dumbed it down from earlier versions.
I can't seem to find the custom options there were before, just the presets.
 
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