Cartoonjosh

Small update (sorry for the soliloquy , I realise the team is working on this)... I'm trying to do some hand-drawn lettering and here the described problem is particularly bad. Every letter I draw by its very nature of being handwritten ends in a wider stroke and thus has cracked ends. Which then need to be tweaked one by one. I am more inclined to agree with Old Bruce, now. This does make the brushes (almost) useless. I know it might sound exaggerated but this single glitch is why I still need Illustrator I really hope so much this will be fixed...!

Hmmm... I'm somewhere in the middle. I wouldn't say they are useless, because I find the overall quality of AD's brushes good and the strokes respect of curves faithful enough (it's very subjective, of course). But, yes, when one's brain is in a free-flowing, freehand, sketchy drawing mode, this "cracked cluster end" glitch does hamper the natural workflow.

Hi Sean, thank you for the reply. I'm happy to hear it's on a route to be fixed! If AD's brushes were able to handle the closure of strokes without weird gobs or clusters it would turn them into 100% viable freehand drawing tools, on the par with their bitmap counterparts in Affinity Photo (or, to stay in the vector realm, on the par with Illustrator's ability to nicely close off strokes). For the rest, AD is true pleasure to use!

I am switching from Illustrator to Designer and so far have really not found anything I'll feel sorry about (in fact I'm loving AD) except one, small, maybe microscopic, but to me important detail: the way Designer closes strokes when I use my Wacom with pressure. For some reason, if I end strokes with heavier pressure, they will end in strange ‘crumpled’ ways. Which then needs to be addressed by playing around with the last node and with the pressure graph. Stroke and pressure fidelity are good in AD, but in my opinion this 'end' glitch does get in the way.

I completely agree with lastfuture . I am switching from Illustrator to Affinity Designer, and so far have not found much to regret. In fact, the Pressure graph is the only other thing I still find dodgy, the other being that freehand strokes (meaning drawn with pen pressure on and Wacom tablet) often end in strange 'broken' artifacts. It looks like AD has trouble closing freehand strokes. But, going back to the Pressure graph, yes, it does make want for a more detailed tool. You don't want to be looking both at the graph and a t the stroke whilst trying to 'nail' the right width. It feels like happenstance. The rest of this beautiful software is so fast and friendly (love it) that it makes this particular tool stand out as quite annoying.