I grew up using Adobe Illustrator. Have long searched for a reasonable replacement for vector art work.

I've settled on Affinity Designer.

Not a perfect replacement, but:

- Does all the Illustrator things I need
- U/I is close to AI, so startup was easy
- The help doc is fantastic, searchable
- 6 month free trial

And best of all, its on sale through Aug 15th: Designer is $34.99 for Mac, $9.29 for iPad.

And it's $82.99 for all their tools/OSes/Platforms!

https://affinity.serif.com
#Design #Art

@davemark And if you have any of their v1 products, the universal subscription gets a further bump down in price 🙂We owned v1 Designer and Photos, and I think I upgraded to the v2 universal license for about $65 or something ...

It's an offer you can't beat! Especially given we got v1 updates for about 7 years or so for the one-time price.

@f Fahim, I don’t know how I missed this all these years. Maybe the best value in Tech.

@davemark Absolutely! There are so many tutorials around for Affinity too. And YouTube videos. Every time I come back to Affinity, that's what strikes me the most — how easy it is to find information about anything you want to do with an app from the Affinity Suite 🙂

@davemark I’ve been wanting to move on from adobe for a while but photoshop can be sticky and dealing with PSD incompatibility has always stopped me.

I found this article to be helpful and informative.

http://www.tommasodidonato.com/Blog/affinity-photo-vs-photoshop/

This feels like a good time to change.

@craiglikes great post, resonated with me 100%. Affinity’s biggest win was making it easy for someone who is used to (in my case) illustrator to get up and running with designer. Cheers!

@davemark a couple of simple aspects I used constantly, I frequently find missing from many vector art programs making it to iOS

Snap to grid, guidelines. Have you used them in Affinity? Easy to find?

Also important, bring to front.

I’m using Apple’s Freeform the most now. Not sure how to remove that dot grid (and it’s not a snap to grid thing, although objects like to use other objects borders for reference.

@Chancerubbage I do all my design work on my Mac. I found all the things you mention (grids, snapping, etc.) via the help site. Once I got it, I remembered it.

I spent some time in FreeForm. It's free. And it's fine. But too many things it either doesn't do or I have not been able to figure out.

Affinity Designer is light years better, at least for me. And an incredible bargain.

@davemark particular in a touch interface, precision and activation of things like grids might indeed be very difficult.

@davemark and the team behind it is very passionate. I really enjoyed getting to know them recently.