Could this be a genuine alternative to Illustrator?
Since Macromedia Freehand was discontinued in 2007, Mac creatives have craved an alternative to the highcost Adobe Illustrator, and with Serif’s Affinity Designer, they may finally have one. Part of a suite of new apps that will see image-editing and design tools released in the coming year, Affinity Designer is created specifically for the Mac and, as such, is optimised for OS X. It offers perfectly smooth panning and zooming, and more than 1,000,000% zoom (you read that correctly), so you can close in on the finest detail without a loss in quality. It ran well on our 2012 MacBook Pro, even with complex multi-layered images.
Unfussy interface
Using Affinity Designer is a dream, thanks to its unfussy interface. A simple toolbar holds 16 essential tools on the left, while floating (or fixed) panels appear on the right, allowing a fully customisable workspace. Along the top of the screen is a contextual toolbar that features changing values depending on the tool in use. Having these options means you don't have to hunt around palettes (or try to remember menu locations or keyboard shortcuts), and they're small and subtle enough so as not to clutter the screen. Unfortunately, some essentials (such as foreground and background colours) have been placed in this toolbar.
Affinity Designer’s simple collection of tools offers familiar functionality, but with a few subtle differences. The core assets of Pen and Shape tools work in the same way as Adobe apps, but with paths having larger coloured visual anchor points on screen, making them easier to use, and editing options available constantly in the toolbar.
Smart Shapes allow you to create anything from a rounded-corner rectangle to a cog or star, but with fully editable options, and this is one of our favourite features. Editing shapes in Illustrator is often reliant on numerical values or mysterious shortcuts, but here you can adjust the number of teeth on your cog or points on your star with handy sliders.
Other tools in the menu bar include a great take on the Gradient tool, which lets you edit on screen using a slider that floats above the artwork instead of creating them via a palette, and a transparency tool that works in a similar way, allowing you to adjust shapes’ opacity.
Although these tools work brilliantly and are great to use, we noticed a lack of certain alignment and distribution options, which was frustrating, and there were also a number of advanced Illustrator tools, such as the Polar Grid or Mesh Tool which do not have obvious equivalents.
Vector and raster
Although primarily a vector app, Affinity Designer also has the ability to edit pixel-based images by swapping to the Pixel ‘persona’. This features familiar Photoshop-style tools, such as Dodge and Burn, Blur and Sharpen, as well as Brush and Lasso tools. Many of these functions work non-destructively, creating raster layers or layer masks on top of your vector art and giving images an added flourish that mean you don't have to export them to another app.
A third persona is available in the form of Export, where files can be saved out in a number of file formats, from Illustrator-friendly AI files to layered PSDs and more. Often we bemoan the inability to export full files to other apps – not so here. Not only can you export them while retaining layers, blend modes and so on, but with Affinity Designer’s excellent slice option, digital designers can export complex images as individual elements (in both standard and Retina-quality sizes) for use on apps or websites. When combined with a Retina viewing mode to check the quality of your artwork, this reminds you that Affinity Designer is at the pro end of the market, and not just attempting to be another hobbyist’s vector app.
Super-slick
And yet, the thing that isn’t ‘pro’ about Affinity Designer is the price. At just £35, it's cheaper than a single month of Adobe Creative Cloud and almost half the price of competitors such as Sketch 3. But that’s not to say it’s cheap and cheerful. For this bargain price you get a super-slick, highly proficient app, which is easy to use but doesn't compromise on quality. It has (almost) all the vector design tools you could want, and although there were some options and functions missing when we compared it like-for-like with Illustrator, purchasing Affinity Designer is not a half measure – it competes favourably with its pricey rival in almost all our tests, and so deserves a place in every Mac designer’s Dock. Alex Thomas