Technical Illustration Tools

[woodworks]

I very much would like to buy this app, mainly because I would love to jettison Illustrator from my workflow before some future Mac OS renders my CS5 suite unusable. But right now Designer is not yet there for me.

 

I do technical illustration (patent drawings), and so my needs are quite different from what seems to be your target customer. Among the tools that I cannot do without:

 

1. Tiled fills — I need to fill enclosed areas with a variety of different patterns, from hash lines to environmental patterns such as wood, glass, sand, concrete, metal, plastic, etc. In many cases, I need to create my own patterns and cannot rely on "canned" fills provided by other designers.

 

2. Dashed lines — I need to be able set the length of the lines and spaces.

 

3. Arrowheads — I need to be able to edit their shape and size.

 

4. Blended objects — I need to be able to create complex, grouped shapes, and then distribute them along a path.

 

I work only in black and white, so any color features are wasted on me. And I need to be able to import .dxf and .dwg files from CAD programs and maintain their editablity. These are minimum requirements for me, and I hope that you will consider eventually adding some of the tools that those of us who work in the technical illustration field will find useful. In the mean time, best of luck to you!

 

[MattP]

Hi woodworks,

 

Right now, Affinity Designer is not a good fit for your needs... all the features you want are on the roadmap and will come in time - so it probably will be an awesome tool for you in the future, but I wouldn't want you to buy it today hoping it will scratch that itch, and then be disappointed... Just watch this space for a little while - we'll get there sooner than you might think! :)

 

Thanks,

Matt