Affinity Designer V2's measuring and scaling tools are a major breakthrough and speed up my workflow of large-format ad design and vehicle wrapping. Up until now I have been calculating the scale of projects myself and the new tools do this for me in an intuitive and simple way. Thank you!
Hi All,
Well, it’s been a pretty crazy week since the launch of V2!
This has been a real labour of love for us over the last year or so, and I can’t even begin to describe how hard the development team have worked on it. Not only getting the V2 apps launched, but also of course finally bringing Publisher to iPad.
With this being our first paid-for upgrade there has understandably been a lot of feedback / questions around future updates and our pricing policies. I thought it was worth addressing / clarifying our position on some of these personally...
Updates to V2 moving forward
Buying V2 not only gets you all the new features you have seen, but we have various updates planned – including many more new features and improvements – which you will get for free. This will continue until such a time that V3 is released. We’re not sure exactly when V3 will be, but I can confirm we are not going to move to anything as regular as an annual upgrade cycle as has been speculated.
It’s worth saying too that V2 does include many under-the-hood changes to our underlying technology, and we have also been investing in several new areas of research recently. Some of these haven’t manifested themselves into new features yet, but overall V2 does give us a better platform to develop on moving forward and I’m sure you will be pleased with the updates V2 will receive.
Updates to V1 moving forward
While we did say on the FAQ that V1 would no longer receive any updates, I want to clarify that was about new feature updates. We will be updating V1 to fix any critical problems caused by operating system updates in the future. So if the next version of macOS breaks V1 we will endeavour to fix it. There will be a point in time when continuing to maintain V1 in this way will not be tenable, but certainly for the foreseeable future we will continue to patch. In fact, we have an update to V1 queued up for release very shortly with some fixes for Ventura and issues caused by a recent Windows security / quality update.
We will update our FAQ shortly to make that clearer for everyone.
Offer period
In case you didn’t see, I’m pleased to confirm we have decided to run this initial launch offer until 14th December to give everyone the best chance possible to get it if they wish / have a decent amount of time to trial it.
Upgrade pricing
It’s been really hard to see some of the comments about us not looking after our existing customers – we’re pretty devasted that anyone feels like that to be honest. But the fact is we felt our hands were tied somewhat with being able to offer upgrade pricing in a fair way. The main reason for this was App Store customers (which make up around 35% of our userbase). The problems with that are two-fold: firstly, we didn’t have a way from within V1 to validate an App Store purchase receipt to reliably ensure customers who were entitled to an upgrade could get one; and secondly, we could not find a good way for people to get that discount via the App Store. Us pushing upgrade customers to go exclusively via our own site (including customers who were previously acquired via the app stores) may also have put us in violation of App Store Ts & Cs which we were obviously concerned about.
I’m not saying that these issues were completely insurmountable, but any solutions we came up with would be messy, and most importantly could have resulted in some bona fide V1 customers struggling to get validated and claim their discount. We certainly don’t have the support resource here if we ended up needing to manually validate tens of thousands of receipts for example.
The only option we felt was safe to move forward with was a general launch offer, which would guarantee that every V1 customer could get the discount, whether they purchased directly through us or the App Stores. We knew a side effect of that would mean some new customers would end up receiving that same discount – but we felt that was a better option than V1 customers missing out. It’s also worth saying that while there has been some good press about V2, all our main marketing has been via email and through social media to our followers. In other words, we felt ok about it because we knew the vast majority of people who would find out about it or take advantage of the offer would be existing customers. I would be surprised if over the offer period customers upgrading from V1 didn’t make up more than 90% of our sales.
Overall I do believe us giving a 40% discount, along with the addition of the new Universal Licence of course, is offering fantastic value for money for those who want to upgrade.
However, taking on board some of the feedback there is something extra we can do – we will offer a new free bundle of content exclusively for V1 customers upgrading to V2 as an extra thank you for your support. I’ve seen this suggested by a number of customers and it’s a great idea as it does remove the App Store conflict entirely.
We’ll need a little time to put something together, but all customers who previously registered or purchased V1 and have since upgraded to V2 will receive a voucher code for this via email as soon as we can.
A comment on no subscription
I do want to say that some of the points above are exactly the reason why software companies move to subscription. Whatever you do with upgrade pricing, you still have the issue of customers who bought the previous version 3 months ago vs. those who have had it 2+ years. Offering perpetual licences also gives the additional overhead of needing to maintain the previous version longer than you would if everyone was on subscription / generally always on the latest version.
We are a small team so some of these complications are not ideal — all we really want to do is focus on developing our latest codebase, push out regular updates and continue with our mission to make great creative software accessible to everyone.
But it does need to be funded somehow. We know you love our no-subscription model, but there also needs to be a level of appreciation that the alternative is having paid-for upgrades from time to time. That unfortunately comes with its own problems.
All of that said, I have to say we have been blown away with the response to V2 - around 3 times as many people have upgraded in the last week than we expected - and we really can't thank you enough for the support you have shown. More than anything the success of this upgrade puts us in a great place to continue investing heavily in development which is ultimately what it's all about, and we’re super excited to crack on with some great updates coming next year!
All the best,
Ash
Hi Guys
Just a quick question is there anything in development for installing .ACO Swatches from Adobe products into Designer, Photo and Publisher also the ability to import .pat files the latter not to concerned about.
.aco would be a game changer for many companies considering the jump to Affinity.
Many thanks
Mark
Hi!
I have some loaded assets in AD.
When I run Publisher - selecting designer persona - opening assets panel - it's empty. Because assets panel belongs to publisher.
I think it would be good if assets would be shared between AD and AP. Am I right?
I have licenses for all 3 Affinity products. With document scales & dimension tools I could finally put Graphic 3.0 to rest and use Affinity for everything.
I think we're all living with the hope that these features are eventually added to what are most definitely excellent products !
Hopefully we may see in a version 2.0 of Designer in 2021 .....
Hopefully Affinity will take on board the suggestions for being able to set a scale on a drawing and also provide an easy solution for marking up dimensions on drawings.
Maybe a feature of Affinity Designer 2.0 ?? 🤞🏼
I'm a Mac user.
I love Affinity Designer, Photo, and Publisher. Is there any chance of a full-service PDF creator that would create fillable forms, edit PDFs, embed fonts, etc., etc. For me, this what keeps me tied to the subscription model at Adobe and all the products I would rather be using Affinity for. With this hook that Adobe has in my work flow, the value of the three products you offer and that I love is rendered moot.
I have looked into other PDf creators by other companies. The closest replacement for Acrobat would be PDF Element but it is pretty buggy and their support is non-existent. It's not even fully clear what company is really behind the app. It smells of piracy to me. Other apps I have found don't edit or create forms.
I am hoping for salvation from Serif. :)
It's been "raised as a feature request" in Adobe Illustrator since the beginning, by FreeHand and Canvas users who took it for granted.
Every vector drawing program should provide user-defined drawing scales. Just as every vector drawing program should show length of a selected path, and provide for straightforwardly specifying lines in terms of length and angle, not 'height' and 'width.'
Vector-based drawing is—by intent, purpose, and definition—all about resolution independence and therefore all about drawing scale.
JET
I actually never use 'scale'... I've just been making gigantic paper sizes that I can tile together for printing (1:1 blueprints of large objects, for example).
But I sure need to make precise drawings in my design software, and need them to print real-size in PDF.
Need rulers and objects to work in both inches and mm, and really need DIMENSION LINES functionality too. Also, a percent-scaling tool...
For me, that would make this software a Corel-killer
Plus one for document scaling and dimension tools. ➕1️⃣
I'd love to have a single vector drawing app in my toolbox, but the lack of scaling and dimension tool drives me back to "Graphic for Mac" from time-to-time.
I have previously used Graphic for Mac 3.1 this provides the ability to set a scale for a document. eg 1: 10, 1:50, 1:100
This feature is invaluable when creating scale drawings for real life objects.Examples include the design of kitchens and room layouts in properties.
As a relatively new user of Affinity Designer I was disappointed to find that there's no option to set a scale on a drawing.
Affinity Designer is without doubt a great product, which I will happily continue to use. The additional of scaling capabilities would open even more opportunities for users like myself.
Keep up the great work ! Can't wait for Affinity Publisher to be released ...
I have previously used Graphic for Mac 3.1 this provides the ability to set a scale for a document. eg 1: 10, 1:50, 1:100
This feature is invaluable when creating scale drawings for real life objects.Examples include the design of kitchens and room layouts in properties.
As a relatively new user of Affinity Designer I was disappointed to find that there's no option to set a scale on a drawing.
Affinity Designer is without doubt a great product, which I will happily continue to use. The additional of scaling capabilities would open even more opportunities for users like myself.
Keep up the great work ! Can't wait for Affinity Publisher to be released ...
Andy-M got a reaction from rt-it in Document Scaling
Andy-M got a reaction from David Longmuir in Document Scaling