Confusion as to what Designer is/isn't

[Quarian]

There appears to be a lot of confusion up here in the forum regarding what Affinity Designer can, will and/or should be able to do. Based on my observations and interpretations of replies from the programmers--granted, these are my personal observations and I invite any and every one to blow holes in them if I am wrong at their own leisure--these "limitations" are inherent because of the true functionality of the software.

Understanding that things such as Spot Color, Exporting to different flavors of PDF/X,  and Multiple artboards are options that are on the way...there are things that simply are best not to create in Designer as these functionalities will be inherent in Publisher and/or Photo.

Text content controls: there is a certain level of control for text that will be available in Publisher that is not intended to be present in Designer. Designer is not meant to have the level of control that would be present in a dedicated Layout application. I know a lot of people will say "but it's in Freehand/CorelDraw/Illustrator," but this is not the point. Adobe has it's own type foundry, to not put full capability in Illustrator (which by the way is one of the ONLY products Adobe built from the ground up as many of Adobe's products were bought and rebranded) would be to not advertise the fonts available for purchase. CorelDraw and Freehand couldn't depend on a Layout package and had to evolve these capabilities within themselves to survive in the marketplace.

Designer IS NOT Illustrator or FreeHand (YET!): Designer is still getting it's feet under it and, while I DO empathize with everyone who would wish for a fully mature program so they can stop supporting the Adobe engine on the Mac platform, Affinity is doing their best to give us a top-flight product but still has to go through some growing pains in the process. I know, as a designer myself, that there are "features X, Y and Z" that we all wish were already in AD so that we may effectively finish our projects. And they may be coming, but that is up to the devs and their timeline; remember, while they're working on Designer, they're also working on the beta for Photo and, probably, the pre-production for Publisher.

Designer IS NOT InDesign: I know, this one's painful because we'd all like to kick InDesign to the curb. InDesign (and Acrobat for that matter) is one of those applications that has VERY little real competition in the marketplace, ESPECIALLY on the Mac platform. On any Mac running anything beyond Snow Leopard, other than Quark XPress, the only true options for Graphic Design and Layout that I've found are Scribus (more on this later), PagePlus (running on a VM or in BootCamp), and an app found in the Mac App Store called MultiAd Creator Express, which has no Spot Colors but DOES have full CMYK support. Where AD is concerned, I'm using Scribus until Affinity Publisher comes out because--as one of the devs pointed out recently--AD and Scribus are using the same Color engine, LittleCMS. Which brings us to the next point:

Designer IS an Illustration Tool: And a damn good one. Affinity has rightfully focused on making Designer the best Illustration tool that it can be. Where else on the Mac is one going to find the capabilities of a Vector Editor, a Raster Editor, and a Drawing program with CMYK and Lab color management built in? Affinity Publisher will be the Layout tool that many of us want Designer to be right now. FreeHand evolved the way it did because it's partner layout tool was bought by Adobe (remember PageMaker?) and Macromedia had to keep giving it features to be more and more competitive with Illustrator. But Publisher will fill the void in the Layout/Typesetting toolset that isn't resident in AD.

As I said before, these are my personal observations based things that have been stated in the forums and the way that the software seems to work. If I'm wrong, bring it...I've been in the business for 25+ years and can admit when I'm wrong. That invitation especially includes the devs.

Thank You For Your Time.
 

[TonyB]

Sounds about right.

 

TonyB.

[halcyon]

I am a bit confused too... But this is a bit more due to vector apps in general, and vector apps used for web design (i.e. sketch/adobe fireworks). So one question: Is Affinity Designer also a good choice for Webdesign tasks (Screendesign, high fidelity mockups) and UI in general? To me it seems that AD offers all I would need for a whole screendesign, on the other hand I am not very experienced...

 

I ask because I own a rMBP, and saw a friend - he owns a rMBP too - designing in Photoshop with the canvas set to 200% - it looked awful...

[Quarian]

It is a good idea to create web graphics in general in a vector software package; provided they can export their files in web-friendly bitmap formats. If they can do slicing and export in 2x (200%), even better. Affinity Designer goes one better by allowing the user to have not only a standard pixel preview of all vector files on its canvas, it will also show a retina pixel view.

 

Affinity is an excellent choice for creating web graphics. In being fair, the only thing I find that sketch has on designer is sketch's ability to export css code with the bitmap export of a full page mockup. Other than that, I find designer's toolset to be superior to that of sketch.

[halcyon]

CSS code export would be really nice, indeed. But this may be a feature, which not all of us need, I guess. A plugin based solution would be very nice.

[TonyB]

CSS code export is on our internal list of features to implement.

[halcyon]

Will CSS export and other Web Design features also be part of Photo, or is Designer the only tool in the Affinity suite suited for web design tasks? I am also asking this kind of questions, because I get asked quite a lot about your tool, when people see it in my dock.

[MEB]

I believe CSS export/Web features will be covered by Affinity Designer only. Affinity Photo will deal mostly with image editing. You can however switch from one program to another with a click of a button. Both will share the same file format.

[halcyon]

I am really excited for the Photo Beta :)