Arcangel reviews Affinity Designer

Here at Arcangel we love to keep on top of design trends, new photography and software releases…we’re kinda geeky that way 🙂 Last week, one of our in-house designers got to check out the latest rival to Adobe Illustrator and here we give our thoughts as to the difference between the two. Check out the video to see the latest update to Affinity Designer.

Firstly, well..the price, it’s exceptionally cheap, coming in at around $49.00, that’s about £35.00 and apparently it’s pay once and use for ever, so for designers this is potentially a cheap alternative to the subscription based Adobe Illustrator model. On top of this, Serif, the makers of the software say that updates will be free for two years. Before Arcangel Images designer, Arvin Budhu, allowed himself the chance to jump up and down with excitement, he quite rightly pointed out that price isn’t everything.

After a few hours of testing in real life scenarios we let Arvin summarise his findings.

There are many areas in which Affinity Designer doesn’t quite match up to Adobe Illustrator, but that is to be expected at the price point. However, in many areas it seems to excel. Gradients for example. If you look at  Illustrator’s gradient and mesh tool, it actually looks clunky in comparison to the transparency gradient tool of Affinity. Affinity is actually more flexible and easier to work with.

There are also elements within Affinity that already come ready to use whereas in Illustrator you would need third party software such as  Astute Graphics’s Phantasm plug-in to be installed to work on layers etc.

In short although we still think Illustrator is ahead in terms of functionality and is clearly the more mature platform, Affinity is looking very promising indeed and for those on a tighter budget it may not be a bad way to get into using Illustrator like systems.

The future looks interesting.