Affinity Designer
Affinity Designer overview
Affinity Designer is an incredibly accurate vector illustrator that feels fast and at home in the hands of creative professionals. It intuitively combines rock solid and crisp vector art with flexible layer management and an impressive range of high quality raster tools for finishing. With accuracy, quality and speed at the heart of every single design task, and the ability to finesse designs without switching apps, this fresh-faced multi-discipline illustrator lets creatives shine.
Vector tools
- Node Tool
- Pen Tool
- Pencil Tool
- Vector Brush
- Gradient Fill Tool
- Transparency Tool
- Crop Tool
- Targeted Insert
- Text
- Alignment Guides
Raster tools
- Lasso Tool
- Selection Brush
- Pixel Brush
- Paint Brush
- Eraser
- Dodge
- Burn
- Smudge
- Blur
- Sharpen
What’s new in version 2.1
Updated on May 31 2023
- Vector Flood Fill Tool – automatically flood fill areas created by overlapping/ intersecting shapes and open curves
- Vector warp nodes now obey snapping
- Brush Panel improvements
- Option to show brush names in panel
- Option-drag now duplicates a brush
- Panel always highlights current raster brush; if you have changed brush, highlight switches from blue to red
- Option to auto-scroll panel to the category and brush currently associated with the selected tool
- Raster perspective and mesh warp live filters added to Pixel Persona
- Turn ‘auto-select’ on or off in Move Tool
- Double click artboard label to rename
- Show or hide special characters
- Balance dashed lines for better results in corners
- Control three dashes and gaps (rather than two) to allow for more complex dashed strokes (i.e., two dot chain)
- New ‘Clear Arrowhead’ button added to Stroke Panel
- Assign shortcuts to blend modes
- Guides improvements
- Delta (difference from current position) is now shown in readout when you drag to move guides
- Holding Shift when dragging now snaps to ruler units
- Shift-Option when dragging now snaps the delta based on ruler units
- Option-drag to create a copy of a guide
- Dragging a new guide from rulers automatically turns guide visibility on
- Option-click guide to delete
- Double-click guide to open guide settings
- New search bar added to ‘My Add-ons’ in your account
- ‘Rename layer’ available as shortcut (Cmd+Shift+R)
- Square brackets now change stroke width in Shape and Node tools
- Drag to duplicate in Layers Panel by holding Option
- Click to expand/collapse all in the Layers Panel by using Option
- ‘Close All’ added to File menu
- Asset Panel re-ordering improvements – you can now drag to re-order subcategories and also collapse/expand all from burger menu
- After renaming a layer in the Layers Panel, you can now use Tab to shift focus to rename the next layer or Shift-Tab for previous layer
- ‘Mask to below’ added to Layer Shortcuts menu, allowing shortcut to be assigned if desired
- Drag/Drop bitmap fill from assets, stock or files anywhere on Color Panel to create texture fill
Information
App requirements
- Intel 64
- Apple Silicon
- macOS 10.15 or later
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User Ratings
Dec 3 2022
Version: 1.10.5
V1.10.6 is out. "Bug fixes and stability improvements."
Oct 25 2021
Version: 1.10.1
v1.10.3 is out. The same for Affinity Photo. (Affinity Publisher remains at 1.10.1).
Mar 31 2021
Version: 1.9.1
v1.9.2 is out. Typically, if one of their three applications is updated, they ALL are: Photo, Designer and Publisher. They are all excellent.
Feb 5 2021
Version: 1.9.0
1.9 is a very buggy update with a extremely ugly splash screen and if you purchase on app store you cant go back unless you have it backed up.
Mar 17 2020
Version: 1.8.2
I would love to use Affinity products but for one big failing – their interface icons are tiny when viewed on 5K monitors. Reading their forums you see people have been complaining about this for years and Affinity won't do anything about it as their interface is based on pixels rather than vectors. The firm has a long history in the Windows world where screen resolutions are not as tight as on Macs so that may explain things. Goodness knows what happens if Apple moves to 7k monitors. Meanwhile I did a 3-year deal for QuarkXPress and Pixelmator and I'm not unhappy, just less happy.
Mar 2 2020
Version: 1.8.1
It is time to dump Corel and Adobe. Designer does it all. It is a total Mac app from the ground up. Buy it and you own it. Support remains strong.
Sep 6 2019
Version: 1.7.2
This is a WOW app. Thanks no more Corel or Adobe. No hidden or blatant subscriptions. Works perfectly even in Catalina. Fast, uses the best of the Mac's OS features. Support is quick, responsive, and friendly. The community is very helpful and friendly! And, the price is right. I would suggest buying directly from the Developer rather than the App Store. Updates are quicker and without some of Apple's peculiar ideas about what is a legitimate update and what an app can do or not do.
Aug 23 2019
Version: 1.7.1
Solid, versatile and fun to work with I have found from early on. Together with their pixel and (most recently) layout applications the creative trinity for me is complete. I am happy, and relieved.
Jul 26 2019
Version: 1.7.1
A great app, for the price. Simple, fast, with CMYK support. Without all the unnecessary things that nobody uses.
Jun 24 2019
Version: 1.7.1
Affinity now sells Designer and Photo directly from their website.
Try before you buy. They have a 20% sale going on right now too. I have all three applications for macOS 10.14/10.15 and Windows 10. For the Windows versions just replace "macos" in the links with "windows"
Affinity Publisher
https://store.serif.com/en-us/update/macos/publisher/1/
Affinity Designer
https://store.serif.com/en-us/update/macos/designer/1/
Affinity Photo
https://store.serif.com/en-us/update/macos/photo/1/
Jun 19 2019
Version: 1.6.1
Affinity Publisher out as of today, June 19th!
20% off. Looking great. Check the website for details:
https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/publisher/
20% off. Looking great. Check the website for details:
https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/publisher/
Jun 7 2019
Version: 1.7.0
Amazing software, extremely stable, feature-full, rich - the kind of tool you can explore forever, and will always grow with your capabilities. The fact that the company is amazingly responsive and friendly is just icing on the cake!
Oct 26 2018
Version: 1.6.1
Still learning it, but it's clearly very impressive software.
Mar 16 2018
Version: 1.6.1
Affinity is so close to be awesome, but can be annoying as f**k at times. When you work with dual monitors the "everything in one window" paradigm sucks. Yes you can switch that off, but then the panels and windows just behave completely erratically. So you can essentially use Affinity Designer only on one monitor… Hm.
The keyboard modifiers for resizing layers (from the center, proportially, etc) are rather uncommon and every time it annoys the hell out of me. Just use the same as macOS uses for window resizing, or as Adobe or Sketch, puh-lease!
Same for the (partially non existing) keyboard shortcuts for selecting and resizing text.
And that black user interface.?Yes I know black computers are faster and black apps are pro-er. But the contrast is still crap, even when I adjust it in the preferences. Super hard to read. Ever heard of usability?
Having said all that, the overall feature set is pretty amazing and given that it comes subscription free is a big thumbs up for this app still.
The keyboard modifiers for resizing layers (from the center, proportially, etc) are rather uncommon and every time it annoys the hell out of me. Just use the same as macOS uses for window resizing, or as Adobe or Sketch, puh-lease!
Same for the (partially non existing) keyboard shortcuts for selecting and resizing text.
And that black user interface.?Yes I know black computers are faster and black apps are pro-er. But the contrast is still crap, even when I adjust it in the preferences. Super hard to read. Ever heard of usability?
Having said all that, the overall feature set is pretty amazing and given that it comes subscription free is a big thumbs up for this app still.
Mar 2 2018
Version: 1.6.1
Since no-one answers on your support forums... Maybe you'll take the hint here: FIX THE FLOATING TOOLS AND PANELS THAT CURRENTLY APPEAR ON TOP OF THE FINDER WINDOW WHEN OPENING A FILE.. THIS IS SO ANNOYING !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! OR MAYBE MAC USERS COME SECOND? Good product, terrible support.. actually no support whatsoever, on forum only users help each other. Guess it's the Apple model :/
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