Ever wanted to get into vector graphics but found software to be super expensive ?

MagicLuthee

Member
Hi, first thing : I'm not sponsored in any way to make this post.

Now that that's out of the way...

Adobe Illustrator is currently king but it's under a pay-forever never-own model, development is stagnant, and it is really lacking in the optimisation department (both in terms of speed and size).

There's a rising alternative called Affinity Designer. It's a pretty neat piece of software with many pro-grade features. A license costs 50$ when it's not on sale (Though of course at this price you only get updates till the next major release).

Affinity Designer might not currently cover all what Illustrator can do but it's getting feature at a nice pace and contrary to Adobe products it is not bloated software ! (998Mo for version 1.9.1.979 which is about half of Illustrator's almost 2Go)

A big gripe I have with Illustrator is that it comes with Creative Cloud which is embedded in it and which adds a few more anti-piracy processes...

Designer on the other hand seems to use a 1 process / many threads model and it keeps its files largely contained in it's install directory which is nice :)

They offer a the 30-day trial which for infrequently gets bumped to a 90-day trial.

To close, I include two screenshots just below.
First screenie is of a copy-paste of simple shapes from Illustrator to Designer. (Gradient got imported correctly which is nice)
Second screenie shows PSOGC's Action, Item and Attack palette which I had partially redrawn in Designer a while ago and which I finished and polished later.

Affinity Designer Showcase.png

Affinity Designer Showcase 2.png

Sept. 04, 2021 : Made some points clearer and improved phrasing.
 
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