For designers who work in Photoshop and Illustrator simultaneously, using Affinity Designer may be a time saver.
With the persona toolbar-which divides vector, pixel and export tools into three separate sets-users can switch between tool sets without interruption to workflow. The learning curve is more like a gentle slope for designers experienced in Illustrator or Photoshop.Īffinity Designer comes with all the standard pen and shape tools to complete complex vector and pixel-based artwork. Budding designers will find all the necessary tools clearly organized and accessible and the default toolbars and keyboard shortcuts will feel familiar to Adobe users. With the ability to edit and create pixel layers, Affinity Designer ostensibly functions as an Illustrator/Photoshop hybrid-but could it be an attractive alternative to designers who work frequently in both programs? Does Affinity Designer offer enough features to sway long-time Adobe users? Or is it better suited for beginners? Tool setsįor new designers and old pros, Affinity Designer offers a modern, intuitive user interface that allows users to transition almost seamlessly between it and Illustrator.
#Affinity designer vector professional
Available for $49.99, Affinity Designer could be easily dismissed as another cheap graphics program aimed at amateurs, but it was created specifically for professional designers accustomed to working in a Mac environment.
#Affinity designer vector software
Now the company is taking on the graphics software market for Mac.
Serif was established in the 1990s as a developer of low-cost, PC/Windows desktop publishing software for entry-level users. What is Affinity Designer?Ĭreated by UK-based Serif Labs, Affinity Designer is a vector graphics editor designed as an alternative to Adobe’s Illustrator. To demonstrate that, here I've changed the clipping shape's curves to add some rough teethmarks to the bite, but if you look over at the layers studio you can see that the cookie is still a simple circle.But does it deliver? We took a look at three essential design components-tool sets, import/export file capability and workspace features-and reviewed how Affinity Designer stacks up in comparison with Illustrator.
Your cookie is still complete, live and editable, as is its alignment with its cutter, and the cutter shape is too - so this is a non-destructive workfow in which maximal flexibility is maintained. The last step is then selecting the fill and stroke of the container (which was a cyan rectangle in my example) and setting it to "none" - the red slash through white symbol in the colour picker. My older workaround before knowing about the Option approach: same as previous but with one extra step: do the same boolean with the same cutter shape to a rectangle large enough to enclose your target positive shape, and once the cut's been made, put your target shape inside that in the layer studio, making it a clipping mask. Here I made a non-destructive boolean union of the base bite circle and some teeth (more ellipses rotated around the centre of the bite circle) by holding Alt or Option when clicking the boolean union button, then once I had that compound in front of the base cookie circle, again holding Alt or Option when I clicked the boolean subtraction, and here we get the whole composition non-destructively, so you can keep editing for example tooth positions or shapes later on if you wish. Oh for those who might wonder - this also allows for nesting of this non-destructively - that is, compounds within compounds - just remember to hold Alt or Option when you use any boolean and you're in business. This creates nice compound shapes which you can easily see and manage in the Layers Studio - exactly what the doctor ordered! Use the same boolean subtraction method I already outlined above, only as you click the subtraction button, hold the Alt(PC) or Option(Mac) key down. Many thanks to Bura for pointing this out in the comments - there is already an existing non-destructive boolean workflow in Affinity Designer - what I initially showed (and will leave up after this step) is a minorly-clunky workaround - the actual in-built non-destructive boolean is super-simple and elegant. This is a destructive workflow (one in which once an action is taken, it cannot be easily modified or undone later upon file re-open) as it directly edits the shapes or suggests looking for a non-destructive method - turns out this is dead simple. The simplest straight ahead method is the boolean add and subtract tools in the toolbar at the upper right in the default Affinity Designer Configuration.