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Guys, how were you sold on Affinity Designer?

I mean what was the main reason (or reasons?) that you decided to give thee software a shot?

 

For me it was the price and the lack of subscription (obviously:) )

 

But also how smoothly it runs (even on Wiindows 10 :D ) and how easy it is to design UI's with it.

 

How about you?

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Same, I was super stoked when I found it now though not so much. I spent months creating a series of images to be used in a line of products that is very specifically Pantone, that is now pretty much useless and I will have to pay for INDD or AI and redo everything.  This has set me back months.

 

What good is it as a complete design tool (with a Pantone Library) if it's only good for stuff used online and prints in CMYK?

 

The problem with it not exporting into a eps or pdf and maintaining Pantone colours is huge issue not to mention very disappointing.  I have since read this is an issue going back to 2015 - I am surprised that it was never resolved.   All I got back was - the design team will look at it in the next upgrade ??? Ya that's helpful....

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I originally heard about Affinity Designer about the time when I was in the market for a new computer, and was toying with the idea of buying a retina iMac. I heard about this awesome vector program that had the potential to match Illustrator. The fact it was Mac exclusive, along with that promo video (let's begin wah wah chooka chooka wah wah...), made the idea of taking the big plunge across platforms pretty tempting.

 

But alas, I ultimately opted to stick with Windows. All my stuff is here, and the everpresent idea that, for the same amount of cash, I could build a machine myself with enough power to drop satellites out of orbit AND get a new monitor made me stick with the tried and true. I decided to stick with Photoshop, toyed around with Inkscape a tiny bit, and all but forgot about Designer. 

 

...until this December. By that point, I had long since become tired of paying $10 a month for Photoshop, and was out looking for something that could possibly replace it. I had just about ready to settle on Krita with a side order of GIMP, when, by total chance, I happened across an announcement that Affinity Photo had just released for Windows. The name is what caught my eye. It rang a subtle bell in the back of my head. I looked them up, and, hey, yeah, I remember these guys. I was looking at their vector program awhile back.

 

I dropped $40 with the intentions of getting a refund if I ended up hating it, and gave it a whirl. The first thing I did was run it through The Test: this old .psd file of a bookshelf texture I made mostly with the intention of seeing how complicated I could make something. Each individual book had its own subgroup filled with shadows and detailing, which were then grouped together in nice little hierarchies depending where on the shelf they were located. Each board had its own layer. And adjustment layers? Out the wazoo! Layer FX? Oh yes. I went all out on that thing.

 

I hadn't run across anything that could open it except Photoshop. Krita choked, and GIMP would just start crying. I figured that no matter how good Photo was, this would probably bring it to its knees.

 

But it opened it. Without fail. Well, minus a couple of organizational issues that took about 10 seconds to fix. I would say this surprised me, but that'd be putting it lightly. It was more like abject shock. I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that I just spent a mere $40 for a program that could nigh perfectly replicate a high end program I had already spent about $200 on. Playing around with it beyond that showed me it was capable of doing everything I was used to in PS with just a few differences here and there. I declared it a keeper, and cancelled my PS sub the next week.

 

Fast forward a couple months. I had intentions on buying Designer, but decided to wait on the Windows trial before making the plunge. It finally arrived, I rode the free week doing tutorials, and, well, here I am. 

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I was looking for a replacement for Fireworks which was discontinued by Adobe and is starting to feel older the more OS updates there are. I was also looking into Sketch for a bit but my work as web developer often requires to open PSD files from so-called “web designers” (no professional web designer would use Photoshop for the task), and no other applications besides Adobe’s were able to do this – until I met AD. And it even got better when I found that it even opens PDFs with layers. And then the price was also unbeatable but that’s just an added bonus. :)

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pricing and perpetual licence played an significant role.
Biggest Factor in buying for me was the unprecedented accuracy of loading complex layered PSDs.

Additionally, I started to love Affinity Photo since it offers a couple features which other programs are not having.

Sketchbook (with Affinity Suite usage) | timurariman.com | gumroad.com/myclay
Windows 11 Pro - 22H2 | Ryzen 5800X3D | RTX 3090 - 24GB | 128GB |
Main SSD with 1TB | SSD 4TB | PCIe SSD 256GB (configured as Scratch disk) |

 

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I discovered Affinity Designer shortly after it first appeared on the Mac App Store, around the end of December 2014. It was only at version 1.1.2 back then, & lacked a lot of its current features, but even so, after downloading the trial version & playing around with it for a couple of hours, I went back to the store & bought it.

 

Price had something to do with it, but more than that I liked that it was fast, very well integrated with OS X, & perhaps most of all that it was not an Adobe product. I never forgave Adobe for killing Freehand, nor did I like Adobe's methods of implementing cross-platform compatibility, which often resulted in ignoring system level API's in favor of Adobe written, platform-independent ones that regularly caused problems in the pre-subscription era whenever OS X was upgraded.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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I alwasys wanted an alternative to Adobe products, and I was used to Inkscape for my vector works (icons, banners, logos, etc.). On October 6th, 2014, I saw a blog post about the final realease of Affinity Designer, but as promising as it looked, it was Mac only, so I sticked with Inkscape some more time...

 

After that, on November 2016 I was just casually looking again on Win Supersite (long time I didn't enter there), and came across with the news of the Windows Beta. I immediattly jumped aborad because I had high expectations on the software; I tried and I liked it. I felt it had many things that Inkscape lacked and considering it's a modern piece of software, improving realease after release. It's not perfect, it lacks many features, but Rome was not built in one day. I believe this is good for the industry, for designers and creatives around the world and of course, for me, as a hobbyst and also as a professional (icons, banners, logos, etc. are a must from time to time).

 

I thought that I would like to be part of this. So, when it finally hit the release date, I purchased it and the book a few days later (I was doubtful about it, I must say). After that, even if I don't spend that much time with photography, decided to purchas Photo as well when it was available on the store, for some minor improvements but also for digital painting, considering tutorials around the YouTube world that used Photoshop).

 

So, the fact that is a good software, at a great price and that this is making a goof impact on industry (even if it's a minor one right now, my confidence in this project is there).

 

Best regards!

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As a Macromedia Suite user (and dedicated fan) I was forced to Adobe (although I also used PS since ver 4) when they bought Macromedia. As Adobe killed off the great Macromedia apps and Macromedia's excellent support organization, I was forever looking how to dump Adobe but nothing much made sense. Then I saw early Affinity demos and thought I had been saved... until I noticed there were only Mac versions available. So I waited, and waited. Then Affinity betas for Windows were announced and I jumped first to AD, then also to AP. I'm struggling a little with ver 1 instability and certain missing tools but this fantastic support forum makes the effort worthwhile!

:)

♥  WIN 10 AD & AP  ♥  Lenovo Legion Y520 15.6" Laptop

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As a former NeXT evangelist, one was pampered with vector-bodied processing (Display Postscript, EPS, PS L2). Those times a lot of apps appeared on the market, like Altsys Virtuoso (aka Freehand), AppsoftDraw, StoneDesign Create, Lighthouse Design Diagram, Illustrator ... etc. Later when moving over to Win, from those former well known NS/OS apps only the major big field players where left over and available on Win too, namely Freehand and Illustrator. Personally I always prefered and liked Freehand much more here, since it offered the things I was used to (no surprise) in the same manner as Virtuoso.

 

However, nowadays I use mostly Xara on Win as a rapid vector drawing app, since it combines most things I need feature wise and mostly have to deal with in one package. - Recently I was looking for something similar on the Mac side, so to say something which may resemble Xara here for the Mac side and so discovered AD. Though being feature wise actually by far not on par here, AD mostly also works quite fast (at least on MacOS) and will hopefully evolve over time into a major alternative.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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My main reasons in order were:

 

1.  Ridiculous subscription fees of adobe products -  amounting to too much expenditure

2.  Constraints for responsive web design - actually make it more efficient than illustrator

3.  Really similar to adobe software making it easy to figure out and use

 

I've only had Affinity for under a week but I'm quite impressed so far.  Still working out how the constraints work properly and getting frustrated now and then but to be expected when switching to a new program.  All in all, I'm glad I went for it.

blueleafstudio.net

Affinity Designer - Mac OS X

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It was simple. I want buy CS6 version INDD, AI and PS, but Adobe canceled selling. After that I don't want endless paying for software. CMYK support was great advantege for me as the same as nice price.So i bought AD and AP. For me is the best software at this price. Support on forum was another in plus.

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Support on forum was another in plus.

It is definitely a big plus!

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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I was thinking of getting on the Adobe-train, but then I discovered Affinity. The price and the video-tutorials convinced me.
I've been learning a lot from the (very friendly) forum... THANKS! :) 

- Affinity Photo 2.3.0
- Affinity Designer 2.3.0
-Affinity Publisher 2.3.0

 

MacBook Pro 16 GB
MacOS Sonoma 14.1.2

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