Affinity Design Review

[Tina Larzelere]

Whenyou create a seamless repeat pattern in Affinity, you can set up a live preview of your repeat, so you can keep an eye on the pattern in repeat as you create it. This is great for beginners (it prevents you from putting your repeat elements in the wrong place) and experts (it helps you avoid making your pattern blocky and predictable). I show the whole process for setting up your canvas in the class, so check it out if you want to see how I set up my canvas.

Because you can work with vectors, you can easily make changes to the colors, sizes, and textures of your images without losing image quality. In most other programs, every time you duplicate or move an object, it loses a bit of quality. This is particularly frustrating for me because I spend hours rearranging things, and need to have that flexibility for my process.

Affinity Designer makes it easy to export your files in all of the common file types (.png, .jpg, .gif, .tiff, .psd, .pdf, .eps, svg, etc.), so you can easily move files you make in Affinity into programs like Procreate, Photoshop, and Illustrator.

Do you just want to create lettering designs or illustrations and post them on your Instagram page? If yes, you only need Procreate. Instagram images are 1080 pixels wide, which is well under the Procreate limit.

Do you want to create surface designs for print on demand sites like Society 6? If yes, then you may need Affinity Designer if you want to be able to create images for all of their product sizes. (i.e. 9000px x 6000px wall murals)

Do you make a lot of surface designs and are looking for a way to speed up your workflow? Then go get a napkin, because you will probably start drooling when you see the live pattern preview in Affinity Designer.

Affinity Designer 1.10 remains as clean and capable as it was, with no notable additions to speak of. However, it's noticeably quicker and perkier, and what it still lacks (for some) in features, it more than makes up for in smoothness and performance.

Although Serif has been making software since the 1980s, Affinity Designer has only been around since 2014, when Serif decided to refocus its effort on a few core design programs. Its steep trajectory since then has shown no discernible lag and this vector-based illustration and design tools remains the main industry rival to Adobe Illustrator.

Ben is an artist and illustrator based in Bristol. He works in traditional woodcut, drawing and digital mediums. For Creative Bloq, he reviews drawing tablets and styluses, as well as the latest and greatest digital software for artists. His artwork has been exhibited across Bristol, and his words have also appeared in ImagineFX magazine.

The Affinity Publisher app is for desktop use on PCs and Macs. Photo and Designer can also now be used on iPads, so check back on Publisher to see when the iPad version becomes available.

My method in trying out Affinity Publisher was to go through Book Design Made Simple and see whether I could accomplish all the book design and typesetting tasks we give you in the book.

Read more: InDesign object styles works in general with Affinity object styles, too.

Read more: Using a layout grid in book design demonstrates how to keep your design under control (and thus more attractive).

Read more: Your book promotion materials suggests many more uses for Publisher.

Hello Alistair,

You can accomplish all of this in Publisher. You can lay type directly over an image without compromising the image quality, and you can also get the type to run around the outside of the image. You would not need to use Affinity Photo unless you had to do some finicky work with the images themselves.

I hope this helps, and we wish you the best of luck with your project.

Glenna

Thank you for this article.

I tried the Publisher 2 : exciting. It seems to me that only one thing is missing for optimal typographic quality: the Adobe paragraph composer. Is there a similar feature in Publisher that replaces the one in InDesign and is a must for any composer?

Thanks for your note! I took the same winding journey through all the applications, finally landing on InDesign for long enough to write our book with Fiona. We both kept the very annoying and expensive Adobe subscription until we finished the second edition of our book but then we went back to v 5.5, which we luckily were both able to hang onto.

If you use Affinity Publisher, you may later be into printing and making your own paperback books, if so you may be interested in a book, free to read on line at:

_bklt_for_pdf__small_V

It combines Four Essays on paperback binding which once appeared on line but now no longer do so.

I have some information on my website about the paperbacks that I produce at home. Most may be read on line at ISSUU.

Best wishes

John

I would say Photo so far is the furthest along. It is only missing a couple features; live trace and selection by color is rudamentary compared to photoshop. But there are work arounds so these are insignificant. Design on the other hand is missing quite a few more. Design is missing live trace and selection by color as well but also gradient mesh, freeform gradient and envelope distortion which are significant gaps. I have not looked at Publisher yet so thank you for the review. It seems that Publisher is further along than Designer with fewer gaps.

Dear Kent,

Thank you so much for sharing your success with us! We are honored to have been an essential part of your publishing journey. And we are excited to get confirmation from a reader that our book can guide folks who are using Affinity Publisher. We knew it would be the case, but wondered if anyone besides us had tried it.

Best of luck with your second book. We love to help people publish good-looking books.

Glenna

Publisher is an excellent piece of software and its low-cost appeal has been enhanced the recent publication of the Workbook. Its scope goes way beyond core skills to cover design and branding. My copy arrived today and I have hardly put it down. Affinity really has broken the mould.

I started using Affinity Publisher the moment the Beta version was released and practiced and familiarized myself with it while simultaneously using QuarkXpress (yes, you heard right). Once the official version of Publisher was released I purchased it and began with simple single page layouts and a few magazine spreads. Those worked great without a hitch and those projects were all printed.

Hi Joel,

Thanks for your question about transferring text variables from InDesign templates to Publisher. I tried a simple experiment, and unfortunately the variables did not work in Publisher after the transfer. However, one of your tech-savvy colleagues might be able to finagle something.

I just resubscribed to creative cloud, I thought I could finish the project I'm working on with publisher but it's just impossible, too many bugs, too many inconsistencies, too many freezes and crashes, it drives me crazy. I'd rather start from scratch than continue with this software. I just hope there will be improvements in the future, maybe I'll give it a chance again, but for now, it's not a "professional" (as advertised) tool, definitely not.

When Publisher works as expected (10 minutes over an hour) it's really fluid, much more than Indesign - preview mode is horrible - (especially since Indesign does not support hardware acceleration on Windows)

Unfortunately this software is totally unusable when you have to face 50 slowdowns a day, 10 bugs and spending your time closing and opening it to find a functional tool back. Especially in a [pro]ductivity context.

I don't have the time nor the will to investigate and report bugs. It's not my job. We are not talking about a minor bug, but a problem that literally makes the software a pain in the ass to use.

I've recently completed some large projects (including a 264-page catalog with over 700 images) with Publisher 1.10.5 and 1.10.6 on Windows 10, trying to work around the known issues. That worked very well and I was able to complete all projects in a good time. Adobe is not an alternative for me. I work alone and can import templates or third-party work as IDML.

I have to concur with OP. V2 although could be great, it has major stability problems. Never had any crashing issues at any point in V1, but V2 I cannot go 15 mins without it crashing out. I thought it could be a memory issue due to having a 8gb base M1 Mac mini, but other users appear to be having similar issues and in activity monitor memory pressure is green and amber. I'll be going back to V1 on my next job unless there is a major update soon.

And they eat daily at a different restaurant in the future, so you forum veterans should read Patrick's post one more time. This forum has the ideal regular members whose Serif's purpose for it is to scare away new and serious customers.

I do have the impression that someone in Serif is listening, but I don't see that the talent or capacity to deliver is there. A thorough analysis of functionality, usability and algorithms and comparison of results with other products even in a similar price range testifies to a company that has not moved like other companies in the last decades. And does not understand their shortcomings. So invest only when and if the products have one day caught up.

What creates value for us is delivering excellent quality to customers, customers we physically meet and look in the eye (and want to sell to again, thank you), after a process where the tools helped us towards the goal, didn't stand in the way and didn't crash. Not to sit and write thousands of posts on this forum, and not to report in trivial bugs that should have been caught early in a large internal testing process.

3) I was here to report bugs and submit improvement requests for professional work professionally in a large setup and to bring a lot of knowledge from the world, i.e. professional product development, web- and software development, usability, user experience design and accessibility. I actually know what I am talking about!

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