Clayton

Just some technical clarifications: If I buy the universal license from the Serif store, my understanding is that will allow me to activate the Affinity suite by logging into my Affinity account, whether I downloaded the apps from the Mac App Store or the Serif website. If I buy the universal license from the Mac App Store, will that instead add licenses for the six apps to my Apple account, to be activated in the future via Restore Purchases instead of logging into my Affinity account? Or will I need to link the IAPs with my Affinity account to activate? I like keeping software licenses together in one place and am leaning toward the Mac App Store for that reason, but if that adds a step I may just go with the Serif store instead.

I too was disappointed to see this wasn't part of 2.0, but I'm hoping this fresh infusion of capital (from finally letting us support Designer again, some for the first time since 2014!) will allow Serif to staff up a bit more and build out some of these long-requested features (without taking another eight years). Vector warp is huge, and it's so good to see it finally come to Designer. I hope the fact that even the hero image for the feature, which shows a field of stripes that you must currently create one at a time by hand, means a blend tool is in the works for 2.1!

I've said this before, but my biggest wish for the Affinity suite is not any one feature, but a new business model. Look at what the UX design app Sketch has been doing with an annual update program: They added more features last year than Affinity Designer probably has in the past four, and they did it without a subscription. Instead, they sell one year of updates – after one year, you can still use the last version you updated to, and it's your choice to renew to get the latest release. Basically, I want Serif to start charging at least a little more so they can fund development more sustainably. I don't expect them to keep shipping great new features when the last time I gave them any money was 2014, but they need to give me that opportunity to support the company.

VectorStyler is an interesting example of a 180-degree different approach from Affinity Designer. They're still in open beta, but have tried to cram everything into their 1.0 branch: VS already has features AD has made no progress on for years like blends, distortion envelopes, and more. It all looks great on paper, but unfortunately... these features are almost unusable. Affinity Designer has been glacially slow in adding features, which is a problem, but VectorStyler has been almost as slow in addressing critical stability issues, not to mention some major usability shortcomings from adding too many features without a consistent UX vision. The app is incredibly powerful, but it's an absolute mess in its present state. If it's a choice between reliable versus feature-poor and feature-rich but unreliable, I'll gladly choose the former. But it will be interesting to see how this race plays out between VS developing reliability and AD developing a competitive feature set.

The question is not so much whether Affinity Designer is still developed (it obviously is) but whether Serif still has any kind of ambition of delivering a viable Adobe Illustrator competitor, and are devoting the development resources needed to do that. The answer to that question once appeared to be yes, about five years ago. Today, I think the answer is pretty clearly no. When AD launched back in 2014, its biggest shortcomings versus the industry leader were acknowledged and actively pursued. Artboards were at the top of the list, and indeed, were one of AD 1.4's marquee features the next year, proudly marked off the now-infamous 1.x roadmap. Then Affinity Photo happened, and AD development slowed to a trickle. Not a standstill – updates such as improvements to the pen tool continued to show up a few times a year. But by the time Affinity Publisher came around, the original Designer roadmap had not only been abandoned, but deleted from the site. Six years after Affinity Designer 1.0, most of the software's original ambition remains unrealized. The improvements that continue to ship every now and then are certainly welcome, but are a far cry from what was once planned. The intended use for AD has clearly shifted. Once positioned as a tool for working professionals, it's now aimed at hobbyists and people who need vector software for side projects. And as someone who uses AD for side projects, it works well for that! If I were doing vector illustration in my day job, though, there's no way I'd choose AD over Illustrator. The time savings of features like shape blends, vector art brushes, envelope distorts, scatter/pattern brushes, isolation mode, and more would have me (however grudgingly) paying Adobe's stupid subscription fee. Of course, Adobe has teams upon teams of developers, product managers, UX designers, and QAs working on Illustrator. Serif, as best I can tell, has one person working on Affinity Designer. But I guess that's not a bad fit – Serif's side project is the tool I use for my own side projects.

If you compare what Sketch added in the past 12 months with what Affinity Designer added in the past 12 months, the difference is kind of staggering. Sketch adds major features at the speed of a tech company, while AD adds minor features at the speed of a solo developer's side project. The key difference is that Sketch has an annual upgrade program. I wish Serif would introduce something like this to fund Affinity suite development – can you imagine what they might have done over the past five years if they had a little more money? The 2015 roadmap would probably not only be complete by now, but we'd likely have new tools that Adobe doesn't have, rather than still wishing for features Adobe had 20 years ago. Affinity Designer is like a skyscraper that topped out at 9 floors. It's a perfectly good 9-floor building, and I'm looking forward to them adding the 10th floor, but the groundwork was laid for so much more.

Strong agree. I still don't really understand what the existing smart curve feature is supposed to do, but this feels like what I always expected.

This tool was originally part of the 1.x roadmap in 2015. Unfortunately, there is no more publicly-facing roadmap.

I’ve largely adjusted to the workflow of creating layers and toggling “edit across layers” on and off, but after jumping back into this thread... I have to agree that isolation mode was always a better solution. The thing is, layers are a flat hierarchy in Designer, while isolation mode is by nature hierarchical. You can use layers as a substitute, but you miss the benefit of naturally nesting groups within each other, and navigating up and down the tree. Alas, there are still half a dozen other higher-priority features I want to see in AD, but this probably ranks higher now than it once did.

Serif always said Affinity Designer would have free updates for two years. It's been three now... I want to give them my money! That said, I understand it's an enormous task to create an entire suite of three professional design applications, even more to do so in a fraction of the time it took Adobe to develop modern versions of Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign. I'm just looking forward to Publisher's release so Serif will have a fresh influx of cash and can hire up more developers to keep Designer going!

I have to agree on gradient meshes. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I used the gradient mesh tool in Illustrator. It was one of those features that always seemed like it would be really powerful, but in practice was always too hard to get looking just right. Illustrator's new freeform gradient tool looks like a big step up, but honestly, I think Affinity Designer still needs to walk before it runs. Fancy gradients are good headline grabbers, but there are other, more basic tools like blend / live repeat, scatter brushes, and vector/pattern strokes that Illustrator has had for over twenty years and Affinity Designer is heading into its fourth without.

To reproduce: Create a picture frame Place an image Set the frame scaling properties to "none" Resize the image inside the frame Resize the frame Expected behavior: Placed image retains size and position Observed behavior: Placed image resets to original size and position

This is one of those things that sounds boring, but is absolutely huge for day-to-day workflow. When I saw the feature list for 1.7 my first reaction was "aw man, my pet feature still isn't there?" but then I saw the videos and quickly changed my tune to "no, this is definitely more important!"

Symbols and constraints are great, but now there's a new contender for my favorite 1.5 feature. :D Thanks so much for including this!

Thanks for the update, Matt. I really appreciate the point about people using the betas for production work and how that makes it tricky to test any architectural changes with customers. Who'd have thought there could be such a thing as releasing betas that are too high quality? :) I wonder if perhaps there's a way to approach these architectural tests that would avoid the pitfalls you described. Maybe a different kind of release ("alpha", "technology preview") where it's clear that core functionality is subject to change? These could have anything from a red banner in the title bar saying "Not for production work - file format may change" to outright disabling save (or only saving as ".afbeta" files). I'm reminded of how Mozilla used to release nightly versions of their email client not under the Thunderbird name but as "Shredder" to remove any doubt of what might happen if something went wrong! In any case, I don't really mind the slow pace of 1.5 news. I work in software too, and I know big changes take time.