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I am a freelance graphic designer with a focus on business cards and flyers.

I have no experience with Adobe Illustrator, but I do have some with Photoshop and even GIMP. Which one would be best for someone like me who is not a professional (yet), but wants to turn my skills into a side business?

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For business cards and flyers, probably Designer is your best choice, but if you do not have much experience with vector objects there may be a fairly steep 'getting started' learning curve.

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Note, both apps have free trials, limited to 10 days from 1st use. try them in sequence.

I too think Designer is a better fit. I'm not a photgrapher, and much of APh is of little or no use to me. If you need to composite or crop images, it works easier than GIMP, so I'm glad to have it on hand.

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It's a joy to have both, tho (and Publisher will rock).

If money is not an issue...As a freelancer, unless you really have a strong source of clients there for business cards, you are going to do a lot of raster and vector work.  If money is an issue, yep, now Designer makes more sense for you. I know a lot of things I can't do with Designer because are more of the field of a raster application, and for those, Photo is great.

For 7 years at latest company, I did most of the design work in Photoshop (flyers, cards, brochures, event posters, etc) . It is doable in certain way, but depends on the jobs/tasks requirements. As a whole solution for freelancing, I see a Photoshop-like (Affinity Photo, Gimp, etc) as a more complete tool in the sense that covers more fields. But those can't certainly export vectors. So, IMO, I wouldn't want to discard any of the two, the raster and the vector tools are a both a must, IMO.

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6 hours ago, SrPx said:

If money is an issue

Now is the spring sale, so you can save something :-)

https://affinity.serif.com/store/

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18 hours ago, gdenby said:

Note, both apps have free trials, limited to 10 days from 1st use. try them in sequence.

I too think Designer is a better fit. I'm not a photgrapher, and much of APh is of little or no use to me. If you need to composite or crop images, it works easier than GIMP, so I'm glad to have it on hand.

I've utilized the free trial and have been going back and forth in Designer and Photo, so I will probably end up purchasing both.

 

Edited by tictactoe
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8 hours ago, tictactoe said:

What exactly is Publisher. On the About/BETA download page there isn't much info compared to Photo and Designer.

 

It is for publishing long(er) documents. Books, magazines, ad flyers, brochures etc. At present it is very much printing press centred. If you need multipage documents it is going to do a better job than Designer and/or Photo.

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I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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