AD for merchandise designers (t-shirts etc.)

[TomOz]

Dear AD Team,

 

I'm a professional merchandise designer (successfully selling t-shirts on Amazon) who recently switched from Adobe Illustrator to Affinity Designer. There must be thousands of merch designers like myself, and I find it astounding that so far no software publisher is offering a product that is catering to this large and fast growing market. Merch designers have specific needs that currently are not really met by any software product other than AI (which is expensive, clumsy, unstable bloatware). As it stands, while I love AD, I still need to resort to Inkscape for several tasks. I feel that there is a huge opportunity for Affinity Designer to fill this gap and to dominate the merch designer market. If you did ad the following features to the existing PC version of AD, you would have a close to perfect product for this market:

 

- Mesh warp/distort tool (maybe with a few presets e.g. to generate text arcs, etc.)

- Convert Pixel selection to Vector shape (tracing)

- A feature similar to Inkscape's Sculpt mode (holding down ALT key while dragging several nodes affects nodes closer to cursor more)

- Mark favourite fonts

- A library of shapes often used by merch designers such as ornamental text dividers, etc.

 

Thank you,

 

Tom

[Aammppaa]

1. Already on the roadmap. See: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/842-affinity-designer-feature-roadmap/
2. Much discussion about this already. Search the forum for details, but in brief: it isn't going to happen until Affinity can make a revolutionary new image tracer rather than a lackluster clone.
3. Sounds interesting. Node manipulation is getting a small update in v1.6, but not this feature.
4. Already available in the v1.6 betas. See: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/32-affinity-beta-support/
5. There must be hundreds of these libraries available already. Affinity is a small team focused on making a great app, rather than clipart, and that is how it should be IMHO.

[MEB]

Hi Tom,

Welcome to Affinity Forums

Although we don't provide specific libraries for this, you can easily build your own library adding shapes to the Assets panel as you use them on different projects. You can then embed them in specific documents, import/export them from/to external files etc.

[thomas.artist]

Totally agree with the OP. AP and AD and just simply fantastic. They have fundamentally enhanced my art making as a hobbyist illustration and graphite artist. I've really dived into vector art like never before. I previously used Ps and Ai. Until AD, vector art seemed necessary difficulty in creating vector art. AD changed that for me. Vector design is fun, interesting and exciting. To the OP's point, I too, do T-Shirt designs and these features he mentions are what we really, really need. For me, the biggest want is a true Text Warp tool and not the mesh warp tool in AP. The mesh warp is really, really useful, no doubt. But, a true Text Warp tool for AD would be awesome. I realize that feature is requested all the time here on the forums and I understand it is on the 2.0 release roadmap. Can't say enough that I look forward to that and that AD and AP simply fantastic tools for designers and artist. Thank you for disrupting this space and giving us alternatives to the Adobe CC suite. Keep up the good work Serif!