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Introduce Yourself


MattP

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Hi All, I'm David Wildish

 

I've been skulking around the forums for a while and posted a few bit of artwork.

 

I'm a graphic designer with over 10 years experience in the publishing and advertising field, I turned freelance at the start of this year under the branding Flokk Creative Ltd - www.flokkcreative.co.uk.

My main love is illustration, I'm rarely without a pen or pencil, scribbling some random crap and like to play with a range of styles.

 

My illustration pieces have been a valuable marketing tool and have recently turned into a niche service I provide for design agencies and clients who require my vector skills.

 

I used Quark back in the day, before migrating to the Adobe way of life...however, I have been seriously hoping for a decent alternative to the Adobe cash cow - having never really falling in love with Illustrator, which seamed to lack obvious additions such as quick way to flip items and the huge glut of pallets always required to be open.

 

I was very pleased to stumble upon the Affinity beta, and purchased on the morning of release - I have high hopes for the publishing and photo packages due soon.

It would be good to have a gallery area, or showcase site, to encourage artist to upload and share artworks.

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Hi iKoma,

Welcome to Affinity Forums,

If you can deal with Photoshop, you will not have much trouble with Affinity, even if it's a vector app.

Any question just post and someone will help you.

 

Thank you for the warm welcome. Actually there is one feature that I couldn't find in any tutorial yet and I don't know where to start looking.

I would like to know if Affinity Designer has the option to create a path on it's own if it's given any kind of reference.

 

print_zpsa5598743.jpg

 

I started redoing the phoenix bird by Japanese artist Hokusai digitally (with Photoshop), but unfortunately I did not use vectors. Before I start anew, is there any way I can use any of my previous work? I have all line brushes on separate layers and I would like AD to transfer my "black outline" into a path.

 

print_zps015dc96b.jpg

 

Edit: To make it more clear. I want these layers turned into paths without having to draw them myself (again):

 

print_zpsfcb7f4fb.jpg

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Hi my name is Shawn, I’m a graphic designer and art department manager for a large screen printing company in the US.  We’ve been using Freehand since version 9.  We use Illustrator on occasion but prefer Freehand as the workflow is so much faster.  Needless to say we have thousands upon thousands of Freehand files.  We have gone to working with Freehand in virtual machines to keep it alive on our newer macs.

 

I’ve been following alternative apps for the last few years desperate for something that could replace Freehand to run on the newest mac OS.  I refuse to go to Adobe CC.  I’ve been following Affinity Designer in beta for the past few months.  I feel like this could be the app we all need to move forward.  Still needs some features (Text on Path, Spot Colors) before it would be usable in our production environment but it’s off to a great start.

 

I bought Affinity Designer the day it hit the app store and hope to get the rest of my art staff on it in the near future.

 

Thanks to all who have worked on development of this great app and to all who support it.

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  • Staff

iKoma,

The first thing i would try is to open the PSD file directly in Affinity Designer. It should be able to keep your layers as they were in Photoshop and you can continue your work from here.

 

Currently there's no way to turn your linework in to vectors in Affinity Designer. This function (called tracing) was requested several times and should be coming later as a new persona in Affinity. You can however try to use a third party program to trace your linework and import it to Affinity. You probably will have to adjust its scale to match your reference and maybe polish the paths a little but shouldn't be a big problem if you want to go this route.

 

The best one i know is called Vector Magic, it's a little expensive but it really does a great job. There's other solutions, including some in the App Store, but the results aren't at the same level.

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Hi! I'm Peter. I'm a publisher and I've been designing and setting books and book covers since the 1970s. I produce both print books and ebooks. The first decent vector drawing program I used was Freehand when it was still owned by Macromedia. I never liked Illustrator much. Affinity Designer is by far the best and most intuitive vector graphics program I've come across. If the photo-editing and DTP programs are as good, I might actually be able to escape the horrendous burden of an Adobe CC subscription. Mind you, I think toppling InDesign is a massive task.

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Hi! I'm Peter. I'm a publisher and I've been designing and setting books and book covers since the 1970s. I produce both print books and ebooks. The first decent vector drawing program I used was Freehand when it was still owned by Macromedia. I never liked Illustrator much. Affinity Designer is by far the best and most intuitive vector graphics program I've come across. If the photo-editing and DTP programs are as good, I might actually be able to escape the horrendous burden of an Adobe CC subscription. Mind you, I think toppling InDesign is a massive task.

 

 

It is a big task indeed, however aside Quark being so behind the times and feature barren, one of the huge things that made InDesign take off, was that it came included in creative Suite as standard - This created a trojan horse effect, thus cutting $1000+ out of each users costs.

 

Also what really did it for Indesign (if my memory is correct) is that it could open Quark docs - Now if Affinity Publisher could replicate that trick with .ind files...that would be one hell of a killer move.

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Hi, I'm Dutch and I live in Japan.

 

I'm not a designer  (although I did do game graphics for a few years when Nintendo put out Famicon)

I do use graphic software from time to time to make things I need  for my work and this time I decided 

to take the leap and get into vectors….

You guys (and girls?) made helluva application and affordable for non professionals…  and to top it off...

you actually communicate with your users… can't get any better than that!!

 

Thanks  to you all!

iMac : 2.3 Ghz Dual-Core  intel Core i5
Affinity Designer 2.0.3 : Affinity Publisher  2.0.0 : Affinity Photo 2.0.0

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Hi. I'm Daniel, from Spain.

 

I do illustration and graphic design, with a big experience on prepress. I'm jumping into Affinity because we need new approach to design software, and i think you are nailing it. I'm looking for your future updates with pro functions with great pleasure as it is an issue i value a lot. As we don't need to send open native files anymore, any good software capable of export standard files and pdf-x can do the job. Ready to evangelize if needed!

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Hi,

 

I'm Jamie... 33, from Delaware. I am a Graphic Designer turned into paginator/ layout for our local newspaper & I feel I have fallen off the Graphic Designer train. Which makes me sad (given hard times in the career industry I guess). 

Anyway, I am new to Serif and Affinity Designer. An old design teacher sent me the link & said "look at this". So here I am and I feel like I know nothing anymore. Illustrator use to be my go to and my best friend  :wub:  4 years ago. 

I watch tutorials to teach myself- but I am looking into going back to college to get refresher courses. 

 

At the moment I have watching your tutorials and TAKING NOTES (so sad). I was wondering if you there is a tutorial or a page with all the tools on it that I can visual learn from printing them out. Once I see them, the names of them & use them  at my own pace I will be set to go (it's how I learn).  Hey I may be able to save myself a few hundred bucks by teaching myself something I ALREADY know!  :P

Thank you for the program and thank you for taking the time to help me out.

 

Jamie

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Hi Jamie,

Welcome to Affinity Forums.

Have you checked the Tutorials section?

There's already a nice number of video tutorials available on Vimeo.

I know some written tutorials/documentation is being worked on.

And there's the Help in the program itself.

 

If you find any problem you can always ask in the forum too. There's always someone willing to help  ^_^

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Hi, I'm Alex Loach. I head the Service Operation teams including QA aspects, documentation, tutorials, localisation and direct support of the Serif Plus range.

 

Al

Hi Alex,

 

We know that AD has hit the ground running and has left the opposition in its wake. So well done to everybody within the Affinity team.

 

Did topping the App Store charts, so soon surprise you? With so much support from the design community and non-artistic users like my self: Serif has had a brilliant reputation over the last couple of decades, so for me this was a long wait in Mac land. Luckily I jumped ship to Mac OSX last year and had to wait until now! Thank goodness for AD and its siblings - my Mac now feels complete!

 

There is one question I'd like to know and it's this...what does the DrawPlus team (the ONLY reason for sticking with Win 95/98/200/XP/7) have to say to its cousin Designer? Love to know that one. I think we all know what Adobe are thinking...WTF...OMG...and so on.

 

I know that this can be compared whisky with ale: you know...the same ingredients, just different processing methods and markets etc.

 

AD was the first ever product I have ever bought from the AppStore, guess what my second one will be. Roll on the next Beta.

 

peter

MacBook pro, 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 256 MB, OS X 10.11.6

 

http://www.pinterest.com/peter2111

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Greetings all,

 

I am a multi-disciplined professional currently working as a mobile application developer (although my primary background, and true love, is in illustration and design).

 

I'm very much interested in using AD to create assets for websites and applications. I'm especially keen on seeing how I can integrate it into my daily workflow, since I currently lean heavily on Ai to generate things such as: icons, launch screens, @2x (and now @3x) retina assets, and background images. So far it seems like quite an amazing utility! Even if I haven't gotten completely familiar with how to do all of the things I want to do.

 

So, from me to you: Thank you very much for creating this app. I'm certain that in no time at all, I'll be using it just as if it's been there the whole time.

 

Cheers,

Anton

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Hi, my name is Kathrin and I try to have fun with this cool vector-pixel Designer. 

I worked a lot with PS CC2014 and Ai, but I never had with Ai this fun, I had this day finishing my first vector image.

 

So I hope to find here some more tipps and useful advices to improve my workflow :-)

 

All the best

Kathrin

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I'm delighted to see something like Affinity Designer come to the app store. However, it's the promise of Affinity Publisher that really works for me.

I'm a writer/publisher. I need good software to create press-ready PDFs and clean EPUBs for both novels and children's book (image laden). If Affinity Publisher can do this, I will be the first in line to buy.

Right now my workflow is littered with Adobe products (which I cannot wait to ditch) and various other application to fill in the gaps. At times, it's not pretty.

From what I see so far, the combination of AD and AP should handle everything from cover design to finished files.

 

Can't wait for AP to show up.

 

Rory

deon.ca

Author and Publisher of novels, poetry and children's books. deon.ca

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I am John, going here by the nick, VectorCat. I am a designer, art director and illustrator, and hoping  to expand my career to front-end web development.

 

I remember the first time I played with vector illustration software years ago. At first, I didn't get what it did until I hit print...then the light went off and I was down the road. I like to offset the super-precise nature of vector with the looser aspects of raster,  so I'm jazzed about the mix of those tools in Affinity Designer.

 

Looking forward to where this will take us all. I am very impressed with AD right out of the gate..its future looks very bright to me.

 

Cheers,

 

John

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Hi!

 

My name is Paolo, I'm an UX/UI designer and Visual Designer.

Love illustration and crafting tools for artists.

 

I'm somehow addicted to painting software... Started with Fauve Matisse in 1994, I've been using any painting app produced since that.

Special thanks to Richard Krueger, Mark Zimmer and Kai Krause, they made me a junkie.  :D

 

Obviously like vector too... Former Aldus Freehand user, forced to Illustrator after Macromedia fusion...

Love Serif approach to graphic software since the first release of PagePlus.

In 2009 switched to OSX so I missed Serif apps so much.

 

AD is getting my work-horse for vector illustration.

The white dog, making tools for artists, illustrators and doodlers

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Hi,

 

Antoine from France,

 

Mac user for more than 20 years, several years that I'm looking for a vector app diferent from adobe series.

So I've downloaded the beta version, made some nice graphics with it, then bought the final version.

 

Thanks to the team.

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Hi ... I am Rod and a designer... everything from Entertainment centres to multi projector theatres...

 

I have been using Corel Draw since the late 80s ... Moved to Mac 5 years ago with a Macbook Pro then added a 27inch iMac

 

I actually went into Adobe CC so I didn't have to run Windows on the Mac (parallels) ... Oh dear not a happy marriage... Back to Corel

 

I discovered AD ... looked at the samples, and within an hour bought it ... I look like being able to migrate all my work over after the learning curve.

 

Would be nice if I could open a .cdr file in AD

 

Great program ... and so good that I got it from the App Store... 

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Thanks Matt ... I suppose that the "uninspired Friday" might be a bit rare judging by the great work your already done... 

 

I have just one query... Can you tell me if I set up two guideline on a page ... can I mover the "0,0" of the rulers to that point?

 

I know that many use cumulative measure but I find it much easier to design when I have a definitive start measure point in the body of the page not at the corner of the page... OR have I just not discovered how to do it as yet??? Still living with the old Corel "drag" the zero points and snap to crossed guidelines...  and I quite like that old system.

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Hi All,

 

It's great to know all of you here.. what a great effort by great team members...

I think Affinity might be the reason why I should by Mac in near future... (oops... need to plan my 2015 budget..)

 

Affinity gonna shake Mac-based graphic designers...

Software Specialist Consultant & Multi-Discipline Instructor

Treasure Resources Network

Malaysia

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