Honest feedback

[Carlos NZ]

I've been working with Affinity products for over two months now and I feel confident to give a good feedback about them.

Pors

- Innovative

- Affinity Designer and all the other apps are really intuitive to use, some of the most used features you can find easily accessible in the menus, things like flip vertical/horizontal, effects and much more. You don't need to dig deep into the menus to find what you want.

- The integration of vector and raster is just brilliant, it is a game changer for illustrators.

- the zoom, the accuracy and virtually no size limit for artboards is fantastic, signwriter will be amazed!

- The pen tool is really intuitive, smart and easy to use, far better than adobe or corel.

- Working with brushes is easy, no so much in illustrator.

 

Cons

- Color palette system, that is worrisome. It is hard to rely on a color palette that shows HSL color regardless what color mode you are working on. Even harder when CMYK, RGB and HSL are all mixed up when you add custom swatches. This is major flaw and must be fixed.

- I get that the artboards are layer containers, and layers and arboards are displayed in the same window, it feels weird I guess because I've been working with illustrator for over 20years. Perhaps that is something I just need to get used to it.

- The interface is intuitive and the hability to have windows in booth sides of the screen is great, but it is cluttered, everything is squeezed, the icons are too small and there is no breathing area around the window titles. Breathing area around text and elements is one of the basic fundaments of design. 

This is the original window for the character section, see how there is no breathing area around the word "Character" even if there is a lot of space in the windows which would allow that.

 

I've done a quick mockup to show how a breathing area would improve significantly the visibility of the work.

 

Conclusion

Affinity is a great software, very innovative but in other had the lack os some basic features and the problem with the color palette hold back many designer that would be willing to switch over from adobe or corel.

I've seen many people complaining of things that are just different, some of these people have been using adobe for years and they want everything to work in the same way that illustrator what is ridiculous. It is just a matter to get used to the way things work differently in affinity. 

 

[Pšenda]

3 hours ago, Carlos NZ said:

to show how a breathing area would improve significantly the visibility of the work.

Personally, I take the opposite view - the mentioned breathing of the text just unnecessarily increases the size of the tabs, so then there is the necessary compression and shortening of the text with a larger number of them, so that the readability and orientation in the tabs loses considerably.

Breathing only with an active tab could be a possible alternative.

 

3 hours ago, Carlos NZ said:

the icons are too small

The icons and texts of the application are governed by the selected scaling in the OS.

As for the icons in the Layers panel (thumbnails), their size can be adjusted.