How do Affinity Designer and Sketch Compare to Adobe Illustrator in 2016 Two years after our in-depth comparison of Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer, and Sketch, it appears that Adobe has taken notice of its two major challengers and has incorporated some key features previously only seen in Sketch and Affinity Designer. Affinity Designer is mostly compatible with Adobe Illustrator. The.ai files work completely if it is saved with PDF compatibility. If it’s not saved with this option, the file is still openable in Affinity, but textures, brushes, and illustrator styles may not be fully supported.
- Affinity Designer To Adobe Illustrator Online
- Affinity Designer To Adobe Illustrator Download
- Convert Affinity Designer To Adobe Illustrator
- Affinity Designer Vs Adobe Illustrator 2020
Written by Echo Rivera and Jason Rivera
So you’re an academic, researcher, scientist, or evaluator interested in learning how to create your own visuals and you’re wondering what application to use?
Chances are you already know about Adobe Illustrator, and maybe you’ve even heard of Inkscape. But have you heard about Affinity Designer?
I mean…we’ve only been talking about it for the last few blog posts 🤣, starting with this one about why you should learn how to make your own visuals. And then there’s this post which shows examples of how researchers, academics, and researchers could use it in their work.
So maybe the real question you’re wondering is: Why do we talk so much about Affinity Designer and not Adobe Illustrator?
We ditched Adobe Illustrator for Affinity Designer and are thrilled with this decision. In this blog post, we’ll provide the 4 reasons that we love Affinity Designer and not Adobe Illustrator.
Adobe Illustrator used to be something you could pay for upfront and then use it for years and years.
LOL not anymore! Sorry, suckers, you’ll now need to pay EVERY SINGLE MONTH FOR ALL OF ETERNITY 💸💸💸, even if you don’t use any of the new features they add or if they remove features you already use.
So, if you want to start learning how to make your own illustrations, and you choose Adobe Illustrator, you could be locked into paying $31.50 EVERY month…FOREVER 💸💸💸. Well, no … actually not forever because they’ll raise their prices so it’ll be even more than that over time.
In contrast, Affinity Designer (cue angelic choir song 🙌) charges a ONE TIME fee for their product. Plus you get free updates (which includes bug and feature updates).
Just in case you think subscription is better for something like Affinity Designer and Adobe Illustrator, you probably won’t benefit from a subscription model because you’re not a graphic design professional. You only need these to do things like make visuals for your PowerPoint or Keynote presentations, visual abstracts, or other materials related to your research or teaching.
Let’s do the maths: in TWO months, you’ve already saved money by choosing Affinity Designer over Adobe Illustrator. Plus if you take our Affinity Designer course, you get 20% off Affinity apps, so you can save even more money. #JustSayin
Affinity Designer To Adobe Illustrator Online
How much could you save in 1 year by choosing Affinity over Adobe?
COST OF ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR AFTER 12 MOS: $378
COST OF FULL-PRICE AFFINITY DESIGNER AFTER 12 MOS: $50
SAVINGS AFTER 1 YEAR = $328 ($338 for our online course students)
How much could you save in 2 years by choosing Affinity over Adobe?
COST OF ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR AFTER 24 MOS: $756+
COST OF FULL-PRICE AFFINITY DESIGNER AFTER 24 MOS: $50
SAVINGS AFTER 2 YEARS = $706+ ($716+ for our online course students)
Yes, you do need to buy a license for each type of operating system, but even if you have to buy every version of Affinity Designer (Windows, Mac, iPad), you don’t have to endlessly pay a subscription fee, so you will still come out ahead.
Maybe you think Affinity Designer is cheaper because it comes with less features?
Nope.
We check in with the Illustrator updates just to see if we’re missing anything that Affinity Designer doesn’t have and have never felt like we were missing out. To us, it’s not worth the monthly price and we actually do graphic design work(e.g., comics, custom illustrations and visuals) for academics, researchers, evaluators, and scientists. If we don’t feel the need to have it, then you—someone who will probably use it mostly for your own work—probably won’t either.
We use Affinity Designer almost every day for things like infographics, web graphics, social media graphics, theoretical models, and more. It has everything we need. Plus, just like Illustrator, you can add things like brushes, fonts, textures, etc. to Affinity Designer if you ever want to make more advanced images.
Affinity has done things like make a full-featured version of their software for the iPad before Adobe did. So a smaller company like Affinity is just as able to innovate and include features as the big, industry-dominating one.
Maybe you think Affinity Designer is cheaper because it’s harder to use?
Nope.
We totally get why you might be worried about this. Have you ever tried using Inkscape? It’s a free, open-source alternative to Adobe Illustrator. When we went looking for Illustrator alternatives, we started there. Jason, who hadn’t used Illustrator very much, found it kinda annoying but okay. Echo, who had used Illustrator for a few years, had a really difficult time figuring it out. Especially after coming from something so easy to use, Inkscape was a frustrating nightmare.
So, we were both skeptical that Affinity Designer would be much better. We’ve never been more happy to be proven wrong.
Affinity Designer To Adobe Illustrator Download
If you’re worried about the learning curve for digital illustration software, then you’ll be pleased to know that we both find Affinity Designer significantly easier to use than Adobe Illustrator (and a million times easier than Inkscape). Compared to Illustrator, Affinity Designer has a much more user friendly setup that will be easy for beginners to learn.
And get this: If you’ve used Adobe Illustrator in the past, there will be very little learning curve and adjustment for you. Echo used Adobe Illustrator for something like 3-4 years before switching to Affinity Designer, and was able to pick up almost everything in Affinity without even looking up how to do it. And yes, Affinity Designer can open .ai files (and .eps files, obvi) just fine.
Affinity is great because they aren’t overcharging for their software or trying to lock you into a never-ending subscription. They are also great because they don’t do things that Adobe does which we find…disagreeable.
Adobe has done things like “testing” higher pricing for customers even though they didn’t officially raise the price of their subscriptions, so some new customers paid a higher price than they had to. They’ve also tried to scare customers that still use their older, non-subscription software into thinking they could have legal trouble if they keep using their old software. Adobe has also been known to try to make it difficult and annoying to cancel your subscription, kind of like cable companies.
Given these actions you would think Adobe is strapped for cash and selling their products at a loss, but no. These actions are coming from a company that made about $2.5 billion in profit in 2018. And a great way for them to make more money is to just keep increasing their subscription prices without a corresponding increase in features. A quick internet search will lead you to plenty more critiques of Adobe’s business model and practices. (See also: Additional Reading below)
(No, Affinity hasn’t paid us a dime or given me a free license. After a year of publicly telling everyone how much we love Affinity Designer, we were finally able to secure a discount on their apps for our Affinity Course students. We don’t make any money off that, the savings are passed directly onto you. We really just love this program and think it’s a perfect fit for academics, scientists, evaluators, researchers, and educators).
Additional Reading:
Most designers coming from Adobe Illustrator may think making the switch to Affinity Designer is a trivial task due to its similar look and layout. This guide is meant to highlight and explain some of the subtle differences and quirks I stumbled into when I first started using Affinity Designer.
This post gets updated while I am learning more about Affinity Designer. You can grab a 10 day trial version of Affinity Designer on their website. Share your experience in the comments and be sure to leave any questions you have here!
Tool switching
Switching from one tool to another works the same as every other application. Pressing the same key twice is a bit different however which took me off guard.
Hitting the same key toggles you to the previously selected tool or cycles to the next tool of the same type. Having the Artistic Text Tool (T) selected and pressing T again would switch the active tool to Frame Text Tool (T) for example.
Selection behaviour
Affinity Designer’s default selection behaviour only selects items completely within the bounds of the marquee selection of the Move Tool (V). I prefer to be able to select all of the items touched by and/or within the marquee selection. Fortunately this can be enabled at Preferences > Tools > Select object when intersects with marquee selection.
Another setting I recommend turning on is Preferences > User Interface > Show selection in layers panel, this makes the layers panel scroll to and highlight the item you have selected, this is useful when making clipping masks for example.
Clipping Artboard/Canvas
Affinity Designer makes a distinction between artboards and canvases, a document without any artboards is a canvas and always clips all shapes. Uncheck View > View Mode > Clip to Canvas to turn off clipping or use the “” Hotkey.
Artboards also clip shapes, but dragging shapes out of an artboard makes them visible. This works if the shape is moved completely outside of the artboard. It’s not possible to turn off this behaviour unlike canvases.
Clipping Masks
Clipping masks are a powerful tool in a non destructive work flow but work quite different from Adobe Illustrator. Select which items you want to mask and nest them under a parent shape, this shape now functions as a clipping mask. Nesting items in the Layer tab is a bit precise however, more on that later.
Finish Typing
In Adobe Illustrator cmd + return is the shortcut for finishing typing. The same key combination converts the shape to outlines/curves in Affinity Designer. Press escape to finish typing instead, I learned this the hard way.
Typos
By default Affinity Designer has a spell checker enabled, something I didn’t expect. Spell checking can be very helpful but I find I have it disabled most of the time to keep those red lines out of my designs.
Spell checking can be disabled by toggling Text > Spelling > Check spelling while typing. Alternatively you can get fix those typos by using Spelling Options ( Shift Command ; ) This lets you review the errors and change them quick and easily.
Pathfinder & Align Tab
Affinity Designer has no separate tab for boolean operations and aligning functions. These tools are always in the top bar unless you remove them yourself. The align functions are somewhat hidden in the top bar but are often found in the context toolbar when needed.
Minimising tabs
Affinity Designer’s user interface can get quite claustrophobic if you’re using all its features. In Illustrator its self explanatory hot to minimise a tool tab. In Designer you can minimise a tab by clicking on the name with your middle mouse button (MMB).
I hope Serif will implement Illustrator-like tabs as this behaviour doesn’t seem very intuitive.
Colors in Tools panel
For some reason the current colors are not displayed in the Tools panel by default, opposed to how it’s always visible in Illustrator’s toolbar. Fortunately it’s possible to change that!
By going to View > Customize Tools… and then setting the Number of Columns to 2. After closing the customization panel your current colors will show up, right where they should be.
Color Picker in the Color panel
You may have noticed the Color Picker tool in the Color panel, this one works a bit different from the regular Color Picker tool. This color picker is used by clicking and dragging it over the color you would like to pick. After doing so the color will be stored in the picked color swatch. To actually apply this color you will have to select an object and press the picked color swatch.
I suppose this can be used to temporarily store a color as opposed to adding it to your swatches.
Convert Affinity Designer To Adobe Illustrator
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