Hi guys

[pixelpupil]

I have just started in illustration and have checking the net for inspiration and I just wondered whether there is any way of telling what software the pros use? Sorry if this is a dumb question but I saw some work by this company www.akaillustration.com and I wondered whether they were using this software?

 

TIA guys, sorry if it's a dumb question, please be gentle with me.  :)

[pixelpupil]

Anyone? Please can you help..

 

Also are there any other good third party sites to look at for what you can do with the software?

[MEB]

Hello pixelpupil,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

 

The illustrations you see on that website are typically done with applications like Affinity Designer (illustration software). I can't tell you which particular software was used for sure, but if i have to guess it i would said it was done with Adobe Illustrator. There's nothing there in particular that you can't do with other software. It's firstly (and mostly) a matter of skills. Obviously some software is more easier to learn and work with than others.

 

You can check some examples of work done in Affinity Designer in the Affinity Designer Sample Artwork section in the Press section of our site (scroll down a little to find it). Some of those images are also available as sample files within the program so you can see how they were built.

You can also see what other users are doing in the Share you work section in this Forum.

 

The best advice i can give you is to try the program yourself and check if it fulfils your needs. There's a Beta available that you can try for 10 days which includes the latest tools and improvements made to the program. You can download it from here.

 

You can refer to our Vimeo channel, Affinity Review (our e-zine), and this list of links for video tutorials, articles and resources to help you get started with Affinity Designer.

If you have any questions, just post here in the Forums, there's plenty of knowledgeable members willing to help.

 

Hope you enjoy you stay here ;)

[Hokusai]

pixelpupil,

 

Welcome to the forums and welcome to the world of illustration. As someone who has been working in design and illustration for a while, I would say that the pros use whatever tool they like best (and one that meets their requirements in terms of features and ease of use). I started out using Illustrator and Freehand and eventually I was forced to use Corel Draw, now I use Affinity Designer. Which one is the best is a matter of opinion. I have always preferred Illustrator over Freehand (but that is just me). Corel Draw, while very powerful, was always a horrible experience for me because its user interface was so bad. Now I'm am very content using Affinity Designer. In fact, I prefer many of Affinity Designer's tools and features over those of Illustrator (the pen and node tool for example are so much better in Affinity Designer in my opinion). Sure there are some areas where Illustrator has the upper hand but Illustrator has been around for a long time and Affinity Designer is not even one year old and it is already incredibly powerful. Affinity Designer is maturing very quickly and I don't think it will be long before Affinity Designer will have feature parity with Illustrator. Affinity Designer has great features (many with lots of niceties like the corner tool) and for the price, you can't beat it. Plus with Affinity Designer, you don't have the hassle of the whole subscription thing to deal with. 

 

What can be done with Affinity Designer (or any other vector application for that matter) is like asking "what can you build with a hammer?", you can create anything, the only limitation is your imagination. 

[retrograde]

Well said Hokusai.