kenjacobsen

I teach several college "Introduction to Computer Art" classes each year and after 25 years of misery with and endlessly overpaying for Adobe products, especially Illustrator, I'm really glad to be able to recommend Affinity's products to my students. Since the classes I teach are in the Art Department the students are geared to drawing and painting and having the equivalent of Adobe's "Blob Brush" would be REALLY helpful. By the way, I hope it's not CALLED a "Blob Brush" –imitating Adobe's annoying misnomers is not a great idea, in my opinion. We're all annoyed at having to "Expand" our vector art in Illustrator when nothing actually "expands" at all.

Third! Designer is brilliant but a pressure-sensitive blob brush would be extremely useful! Also badly needed is an eraser tool that works in the same way. While I'm at it, calling it a Brush tool, a la Illustrator, when it doesn't work at all like a brush, is counter-intuitive. I teach Illustrator at a college and have to spend way too much time explaining how un-brushlike the "brush" tool is -not to mention Illustrator's insane pencil tool –and a whole lot of others. I suspect that software designers don't appreciate how completely unintuitive drawing with vectors can be for those who draw professionally –when a correction needs to be made, coat-hanger-wire bending is not how people who draw make corrections. They just draw again, just like the blob brush and eraser do. Thank you, Affinity! By the way, I always recommend you to my students.

Here's another vote for a trace tool! I notice that "Convert Pixel selection to Vector shape" is on the Roadmap, so hopefully that means its in the pipeline. I've been using Illustrator, and their tracing tool (originally a separate program called Steamline) fulltime since 1995.