If you haven’t heard, Affinity Designer is a vector-based app that truly gives Adobe Illustrator a run for its money. Designed by Serif out of the UK, Affinity Designer has been created by designers for designers and holds a variety of features that are smartly chosen and super useful for creatives. Affinity Designer essentially functions like an Illustrator and Photoshop hybrid, bringing in features from both apps. How to download from pinterest on mac. Whether you are a branding, print, web, or package designer, Affinity Designer has something for you.
The interface design has a familiarity to it that most people will like. Affinity Designer looks like an Adobe product, and that’s good. Smart, intuitive and well-organized, creatives will have no problem adapting to working in the Affinity Designer environment.

Similar to Illustrator, Affinity gives you the ability to use the Shift key to constrain the proportions of the shape while dragging (useful when creating squares, perfect circles, etc.), and/or the Control key to draw or resize the shape from the center out.
- Artista is a pack of useful Affinity resources including brushes and textures. Each of the 60 brushes offers its own artistic touches to help you complete your creative projects. You'll find useful variations of pencils, dry brushes, sprays, and pens in this bundle. There are also grunge textures included, as well as a help file.
- Hi, My name is Sajid Memon and I am graphic designer and illustrator. A creative, observant, passionate more like a self taught designer. Being a small town guy I was not well informed about formal design education in my early teenage but I was always fascinated about design, art and techniques behind.
- Affinity Designer is a great choice for you, since it’s a low-cost way to experience virtually all the features of an app like Illustrator, but at a fraction of the cost. Affinity Designer is normally available for $49.99. This is a one-time fee, with no subscription or renewal charges, and as of this writing, future upgrades are included.
Affinity Designer provides a compatible app as well. It supports a large collection of file types like EPS, PDF, PNG, TIFF, and GIF for import and export. File conversion is also simple—you can open a PSD, AI, or EPS file and edit them right from within Affinity Designer. While saving back to AI format isn’t a feature, you can save anything you are working on as a PSD.
Perhaps most importantly, Affinity Designer is affordable, it costs $39.99 to buy and you’re not tied into a subscription with this app. Right now they are offering a special appealing to web designers—you get 20% off as well and the Grade UI kit for $58.
Until recently Affinity Designer was only available for MAC, however, they have recently released a Beta Windows version, which you can download here.
Here Is Why Affinity Designer Stands Out
- Affinity Designer supports a wide color space including RGB, CMYK, Lab, Grayscale and Pantone.
- You can Zoom over 1,000,000%, which makes creating refined design work much easier.
- Adjustments and effects are non-destructive. You can apply as many effects as you like and still revert back to your original.
- A huge library of adjustment layers, effects and blend modes you can apply to masks and clipping layers.
- Custom workspaces for many kinds of projects.
- A fun, useful and comprehensive shape library and shapes you can adjust and modify with easy-to-understand controls.
- Refined typographic control and text styles.
- Powerful artboards designed with responsive and app design in mind.
- Support for Symbols. You can make one instance of an object, like a button, use it across a project, but have to change it only once.
Margaret Penney is the Managing Editor of Notes on Design. Margaret is a teacher, designer, writer and new media artist and founder of Hello Creative Co.
For creatives seeking a thorough training in illustration and graphic design, Sessions College offers accredited fully online illustration certificate and illustration degree programs. Contact Admissions for more information.
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Every day in May 2020, we premiered a creative session from a creative professional which demonstrated their Affinity workflow. Artists from all over the world took part, and these sessions are full of inspiration as well as handy tips and tricks. Plus, for many of the sessions, the creatives also provided some fabulous free content to help you follow along and try out their techniques.
In this article, we feature a taster of the video content available to view. You can watch the full playlist over on our YouTube channel.
An overview of the Affinity Suite
We kicked off our Lockdown creative sessions with this very useful overview of the Affinity Suite, hosted by our Managing Director Ash Hewson. If you ever wondered why our game-changing StudioLink, found in Affinity Publisher, was useful for a workflow that encompasses vector design, photo editing and layout design, then this one is definitely worth a watch…
Get inspiration for your Affinity Designer projects

A swathe of sessions are available featuring design and illustration heavyweights and pro-users of Affinity Designer, such as Christi du Toit, Pierre Kleinhouse, Isabel Aracama, Bob Byrne, Tiago Galo, David Sossella, Jesse Showalter and our very own product expert Matt Searston. These sessions cover a huge range of topics including how to design an interface for a podcast app, illustrating from a reference image, creating artwork for a two-colour screenprint, and more.
You can view all the Lockdown sessions that covered Affinity Designer in this playlist.
For a taster of what’s in-store—watch sports illustrator Chris Rathbone in action as he shows you how to create a dynamic car illustration with a specific focus on motion, speed and energy.
Watch on-the-go workflows for Affinity Designer for iPad
Join a hand-picked group of highly talented illustrators and designers including award-winning illustrative designer Steve Simpson, professional illustrator and muralist Monez and freelance illustrator and lettering designer Tobias Hall as they walk you through their real-world creative workflows in Affinity Designer for iPad.
You can view all the Lockdown sessions that covered Affinity Designer for iPad in this playlist.
For an idea of what’s in-store, check out Isabel Sousa’s process for creating a moody isometric illustration using Affinity Designer for iPad.
Discover new ways to edit in Affinity Photo
Learn professional techniques, tips and tricks for image compositing, editing and retouching in Affinity Photo from a raft of renowned photographers and digital artists from around the world, including headshot and portrait expert Ivan Weiss, landscape photographer Matt Donovan, conceptual photographer Elena Paraskeva, product photographer Fernando Martins Ribeiro, Affinity aficionados Affinity Revolution, commercial photographer Joseph Cristina and our very own product expert James Ritson.
You can view all the Lockdown sessions that covered Affinity Photo in this playlist.
For a flavour of the tutorials on offer, check out this sci-fi inspired session from professional designer and artist Olivio Sarikas.
Affinity Illustrator Font

Learn valuable workflow tips for Affinity Photo for iPad
Learn valuable editing and workflow tips from pro-users of Affinity Photo for iPad, including fine art photographer and smartphone photography guru, Jo Bradford, visual artist Manuel Camino and UI/UX designer Paolo Limoncelli.
Outlook web access app mac. You can view all the Lockdown sessions that covered Affinity Photo for iPad in this playlist.
For a taster of what’s in-store, watch professional photographer Drue Photo in action as he guides you through his workflow for retouching a portrait image.
Get inspiration for your next Affinity Publisher project
Join esteemed professionals from the world of publishing as they offer valuable tips and time-saving tricks for setting up a brochure, a brand manual and a real-world magazine in Affinity Publisher. Session contributors include designer and premium template creator Julien L’Hermet, aka ID Vision, premium layout template creator David Hussner, aka EgoType and our new in-house product expert Emily Goater.

You can view all the Lockdown sessions that covered Affinity Publisher in this playlist.
If you’re looking to move your workflow from InDesign to Affinity Publisher and have questions such as: Which document features are supported? How can I get the cleanest possible conversion? And what happens if I don’t have access to InDesign? Mike Rankin—Editor-in-Chief of CreativePro, InDesignSecrets and InDesign Magazine—explores these questions and more in his creative session to help you make a smooth transition from InDesign to Publisher. Check it out…
Watch more tutorials
Affinity Designer Vs Adobe Illustrator
All these creative sessions and more are available to watch on our YouTube channel. Subscribe now and be the first to know when new videos are added.
