Affinity Designer after 15 years of professional CorelDraw adventure.

[Onur]

I love CorelDraw. It's amazing, well established and popular yet somehow very underestimated software worldwide. Very user friendly and simple usage most of the times comparing to Illustrator and even to Photoshop as i make medium level edits on photos in it (not Corel PhotoPaint, with CorelDraw).

 

Simple, powerful software with amazing vector drawing capabilities with multi page support. One of the best import/export file type support. Capability to work with enormous medium sizes (in meters not MB's). Plotter / Laser Cutting machine friendly environment, nice offset printing results. There are lots of benefits to work with Corel Draw. So i should give it's credits.

 

However, there are many reasons as well to make me feel it's time to change like it's not effective to work on projects which will end up on digital mediums like web pages, mobile devices etc. with it's current (X6) image export qualities. Illustrating with it's brushes via drawing tablets is terrible. Isn't it funny that one of the best digital illustration software belongs to them (Painter) but they.. anyway. You can't open new versions CDR formats with older ones even there isn't anything special so you have to pay upgrades each year or two. It's going like this.

 

Several months ago i was planning to move to Illustrator with grief to be honest. I don't like (or get used to) Illustrator's way to do things. I don't like Adobe's CC's subscribtion thing which is Corel will go on that way in the end i guess. You have to pay $50 each month which big pain even worse if you just need 2 apps (Illustrator & Indesign) and even more worse if your own currency loosing it's value against USD (:

 

So luckily i find Affinity, joined it's Windows BETA. Somehow find it more similar to CorelDraw than Illustrator. I didn't go deep yet though. I am talking about very simple / basic things like selecting multiple objects, giving transparency, text controls kind of stuff for now. They are not big deal unless you frequently use them while you work. In that case it will change your creation process speed and effectiveness.

 

So hopefully i will migrate from CorelDraw to Affinity Designer completely soon after i learn things that vital for me. And during these period i will share my experiences, compare with CorelDraw and have some suggestions here in this post.

 

I will try to use Affinity Designer on different mediums when i have chance.

 

I know each software have it's own way to do things but there several good stuff that you can implement i guess. 

[Onur]

Clonning:

 

AD needs you to hold CTRL before moving an object to clone it and also not clonning a guideline as i observe.

 

In Corel, there is a very very very quick and useful way to clone anything on screen. If you right click while moving something you will have a clone whatever you picked, that's so simple.

 

It clone wheter it's rectangle, line, guideline even a raster image.

[catlover]

I moved from Windows to Mac 3 years ago because I was fed up with Microsoft's policies.

Unfortunately, Corel Corp does not make Mac-specific software anymore.

I think Corel Suite 10/11 was the last one running on Mac.

So, after having used the Corel Suite from Version 3 all the way through to 10/11, I had to move from Corel to another drawing program, albeit with pain in my heart....

 

I chose Affinity Designer & Affinity Photo to replace Corel Draw & Corel Photo Paint.

I am NOT a professional designer, just a hobbyist, so there are features in Photo that are beyond my needs.

Not so in Designer, though, there I use almost all features available.

 

As to comparing Corel Draw to Aff Designer : it can do almost anything that Corel Draw did, the features I miss are (to me personally at least) not so important.

 

Having said that, there are functionalities that definitely are missing from Aff.Designer & Aff Photo.

Mainly to do with ease of use, although you can get used to doing things another way, of course, so nothing to gripe about.

 

However, there are also a few issues that have not yet been addressed  but should definitely be taken care of.

Repeated posted from me and quite a few more users, over a long period of time,  have not met with result, which leaves me to fear that as far as that is concerned, things have been cast in stone.

 

On the bright side though : the guys & girls from Serif (Moderators, Staff, Devs etc. ) and other members of the forum are top-class.

Extremely  quick & friendly to respond to questions, gripes and other matters.

So, in short : Get used to using Aff Designer & Aff Photo, you will be pleasantly surprised.

 

I would be very interested to hear about your comparison notes. You can send me a personal message if you want.

C.L.

[gdenby]

I too used Corel Draw for several years after they were no longer developing for the Mac. Eventually, it became to unstable. It was a fine program, tho when I stopped using it, it was just starting to be useful for web design. 

 

Do note that CD had over 10 years of development at that point. I'm not surprised that some of the capabilities are not yet built into the AD framework.

 

And yes, I recall it was very clumsy when used w. a tablet.

[Onur]

@catlover

 

I don't have serious doubts about capabilities of AD too. I believe we will love each other soon and will have nice future together.

 

@gdenby

In my opinion development process of CD goes in snail pace and thinking their efforts to improve their flag ship software is not good as relatively smaller companies like Serif or Bohemian.

 

Look around, many more users trying to leave Adobe products day by day and those smaller teams react way faster than those bulky old companies. 10 years ago there were software for specific purposes like business card design but they were never as good as Illustrator or CD so professionals looks them as jokes.

 

But now many infamous UI designers deciding to use a software which is less than 30 mb small and featureless if you compare those giants. 

 

New software means more bugs but also it means they don't carry the burden of their past (: