Greetings from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
My name is Jon and I'm a lone wolf digital product designer, occasional start up founder. accidental writer and random DJ.
I have been in the UX/ UI design game for quite a while, dating back to the days of Macromedia. I found a friend in Fireworks, and of course, suffered through Adobe's tyranny over the years.
When Adobe dropped support for Fireworks, I decided to switch to Sketch.
It hasn't been a perfect ride, but in general, I'm in love with the tool or rather, a tool that is tailored for the UX/ UI design workflow. Especially given the number and range of screen types we must consider in design.
Further, what keeps me there is the ecosystem around it, which would be the plugins, the integrations with Zeplin, Invision and so on.
I’ve always been extremely impressed with the quality and stability of Affinity’s software.
In fact, I have owned licenses for Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer for quite a while.
I occasionally use AF Designer, but to be honest, it wasn’t really best suited for my work and workflow. The release of AF Designer 1.5 looks to have opened the door for something exciting.
I’m reconsidering it for use as my primary UX/ UI design tool.
My main concern at this point is developer hand-off, which is a huge source of friction and one that Zeplin solves very well. I’ll be curious to see how that goes with AF Designer.
Finally, just to chime in on a massive pain point, which is broken and disconnected from the current UI design process, and that point is interactive prototyping. With all of the challenger UI tools hitting the market, most have failed to address interactive prototyping, those that have addressed it, have not really hit on anything that useful yet.
Congrats on this launch of 1.5 - it looks beautiful, fast and useful, and I can’t wait to get into my office and give it a whirl on Monday.
Take care.
