lack of competitive text editing tools

[DGee]

This is probably my last post here as I've just paid for a whole year of Adobe Creative Cloud.

I really hate Adobe's subscription model and that's why I tried to build a professional workflow around Affinity apps at all costs over the past two years or so.

In the process I've spent / wasted countless extra hours dealing with the lack of basic tools such as optical kerning, warp effects (which is now a welcome addition in v2 though it still lacks behind Adobe's in many aspects) text view options (like hide cursor, hide text boxes, text edges that really slows you down), mesh / freeform gradients, lack of image tracing, lack of vector integration with after effects or apple motion, unreliable integration with Photoshop (unexpected changes in appearance that makes it unreliable in any professional workflow, good luck trying to edit a photoshop mock-ups) lack of 3rd party plugins, mockup incompatibility just to name a few.

In hindsight it was not worthy at all for me. I honestly cannot understand why Serif has not implemented basic stuff as variable font support, optical kerning or text view options when you have here people who has been asking for those basic features for many many years. It feels as if you don't care at all. When I use these apps, despite they all have amazing features, pack incredible technology under the hood, and have a lot of potential, it's a real struggle on many fronts. For me the final deal breaker was the lack of competitive text editing tools and the lack of optical kerning in particular. When you have to kern many texts daily it just makes zero sense. Maybe you should listen to your customers and probably get a top notch design consultant to guide you in building a truly competitive workflow for designers. You've probably build that workflow for illustrators, IDK as I'm not one but I'm afraid not for designers.

Good luck with everything, I'll check back in a year in hope that I can go back to using these apps. I would honestly love to see Designer evolve and become a true Illustrator killer.