[Noobs here: Contact Affinity, licences etc...]

Hi everyone :)

 

We're a small research lab (~15 people) at a public university. We're looking for a replacement for our Adobe CS5 suite (we use mostly illustrator and a little bit of photoshop) since it seems to become problematic when running on new macs (10.11.x). We use both macs an Windows PCs...

 

We thought of upgrading to Creative Cloud but we find a lot of negative reviews on the web, the price is quite high and support for OSX El Capitan also seems to be somewhat problematic (or at least it was). We thus considered switching to other softwares.

 

We would preferably find an alternative that is cross platform (Windows-OSX) but if we cannot find any then this is what it is. However, we would like somthing that can open Illustrator (.ai) and photoshop (.psd) files without any issue. We also need something that can save files in a format that can be opened by illustrator/photoshop respectively since we need to share files with external collaborators and cannot control what software they use.

 

Affinity Designer looks promising. I have a few questions though:

 - Can it run on Windows7? It looks like it cannot but I'd like to be sure...

 - How can I contact affinity to ask them about licencing options? I found this page (https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/education/) but I don't understand all of it...

 

Thank you very much in advancve for your help.

Best,

-a-