rowettd

I learned to illustrate and design pages on a Mac more than 20 years ago at a major publisher when I had no choice but to put away the ink, colored markers and drawing board. The tools I was given were Freehand, Photoshop and QuarkXpress. A few colleagues preferred Illustrator; I tried it, but despised having to run back to the toolbox every time I wanted to perform one minor operation. I loved Freehand because it was a tool that was straightforward, powerful, and never got in the way of creativity. I was always in control of Freehand and never the other way around. The same cannot be said of its competition. I was angry when Adobe bought Freehand for the sole purpose of killing it, lying about bringing all the loved features of Freehand to Illustrator. They never did. Then, insult was added to injury when Adobe switched to their ransomware business model. For many years, I ran two hard drives in my Mac Pros at home and the office, just so I could continue to use Freehand. Shutting down the current OS so I could log into the old OS was cumbersome, but worth it to continue using my unsupported copy of Freehand. When even my trusty Mac Pro became too old to update, I bit the bullet and bought a new MacBook Pro, knowing that I could no longer use my beloved Freehand nor Photoshop CS6. I redoubled my search for graphics software that was user-friendly, but powerful. Happily, I discovered Affinity and have bought Designer and Photo (I know Xpress too well to change now). With the help of the video tutorials and Affinity's excellent intuitiveness, I'm almost as comfortable with this modern software as with my old friends. However ... As powerful and feature-rich as Designer is, I am surprised and disappointed that there is not a simple method to distort text-on-a-path. This is a common technique for commercial graphic designers. It's a shortfall that needs to be addressed pronto!