Using Affinity Designer in an Adobe Illustrator Work Environment

[brent_harris]

Hello,

 

I am really liking Affinity Designer as an alternative to using Adobe Illustrator. I am a logo designer/brand consultant, and I find the tools that I require are very well represented in Affinity Designer. In fact, I have yet to find a situation where Affinity has not been able to match Adobe for my purposes. 

 

The problem arises when I work within a team or collaborate on something with another designer (which I often do). 

 

As most of you are aware, Adobe Illustrator is the industry standard. The problem arises when I work within Affinity Designer but then need to forward the work to another designer to add/edit within Adobe Illustrator. They of course will not get an AI file and, exporting to other file formats (PDF, EPS, SVG) does not always work well. For example, if I am working with gradients, there is almost no way that I can find, to send a file to an Adobe Illustrator user, in which he/she can edit this gradient. It either gets converted to a raster image (PDF, EPS), or, in the case of SVG creates a completely different gradient.

 

The only solution I could think of would be to add an additional charge to my clients/contractors that need me to work within Adobe Illustrator to cover the cost of a one month subscription for Illustrator. I would rather not do this however. 

 

Can anyone recommend any sort of solution to this problem? As I said, I would love to have Affinity Designer as my main illustrating tool, however this pitfall makes it difficult to work in a professional environment with other designers. 

[DWright]

Hi brent_harris,

 

Welcome to the forum.

 

Illustrator is rasterising the gradient when the file is opened if you open the file in a different app such as iDraw the gradient is full editable. This link to an earlier post explains in more detail.

 

Regards,

Darren