Affinity Designer 2, the latest release from developer Serif, brings a multitude of new features and improvements to your drafting table. This powerful graphic design software has become a strong competitor to the industry leaders we mention in our list of the best graphic arts software: Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw. Affinity Designer is an Editors' Choice winner, alongside Illustrator and CorelDraw, and should be one of the apps you consider for editing vector graphics with pro-level features, especially if you're on a budget.
How Much Does Affinity Designer 2 Cost?
You can purchase Affinity’s apps individually for a flat price, beginning at $19.99 for the iPad version or $169.99 for the complete Affinity trio. The latter includes Designer 2, Photo 2, and Publisher 2, plus activation on multiple platforms including Mac, Windows, and iPad. If you want just the Affinity Designer desktop app for Mac or Windows, it's a flat $69.99. You can get a free 30-day trial as well.
How do these prices compare with other graphics software? They're certainly more attractive than Adobe Illustrator's subscription model ($20.99 per month) or CorelDraw's higher upfront cost. The lowest price version of CorelDraw is Essentials ($155), though it's from 2021. The full 2023 CorelDraw Suite is $859.
Affinity Designer 2 System Requirements and Setup
Nothing unusual is required to install and use Affinity Designer on multiple platforms. Macs need to be running Catalina or later, with an Intel processor or Apple’s M1/M2 chip, 8GB RAM, and 2.8GB drive space. PCs must be running Windows 10 or later, with a 64-bit processor, hardware GPU acceleration, graphics card, 8GB RAM, and 1GB drive space. iPad Pro and models 2017 onward, running iPadOS 15 or later, are supported.
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You can buy the single app (or the three-app, cross-platform Universal License) through the Affinity.store website, Mac App Store, or Windows Store. You can create your Affinity ID and register the software from within the app (with an internet connection). You’ll also find in the Affinity Store free and purchasable content like cool brushes, assets, and more.
Using Affinity Designer 2
Interface
The first thing you notice when you launch Affinity Designer is its modern-looking, intuitive interface. The UI is well-organized, and the tools are easy to locate. If you're familiar with Adobe Illustrator or other vector graphics editors, you'll feel close to home with Affinity Designer.
Layouts and illustration work can live on multiple (and unlimited) artboards, any of which can be saved as a template for easy access from within the home screen.
The iPad version of the app is developed thoughtfully to maximize the benefits of touch, gestures, and Apple Pencil input.
One of the stand-out interface features is the ability to customize to your heart’s delight. You can rearrange tools and panels, create your own key-command shortcuts, hide your palettes if you tend to get messy, and even adjust the colors and sizes of the interface—buttons too. On desktop versions, you can create your own toolbars and toolbar layouts, reorganize your floating or docked panels, and save custom workspaces (as you can in Adobe Illustrator).
Learning, Help, and Community
Affinity Designer offers substantial support for its users, including a YouTube channel full of inspirational tutorials created by product experts and pro users. In the app itself, you also get contextual hints and built-in help that makes it a lot easier for new users to get going quickly. The Affinity Designer community is active and engaged, which provides another level of insight and support.
Upon opening either the iPad or desktop version of the app, you have the option to download and explore sample artworks from talented professional users. You can learned a lot from dissecting the work of others.
What’s New in Affinity Designer 2?
Since our last review of Affinity Designer (Version 1.10.1), Serif has packed in plenty of updates and improvements. Let’s look at a few of my favorite new features.
Vector Warp
Affinity’s Warp tool is like Illustrator’s Warp menu (adjustable presets) and Envelope Distort tool (warping within a grid), but it also includes preset options for full fisheye and twisting distortions. Like Illustrator, the effect is non-destructive (unless it’s expanded), and you can use the tool on any vector—image or type.
Note that in Illustrator, type must be converted to outlines before using Envelope Distort or the powerful FILTERiT 5 plug-in Warp Tool, the latter being more closely aligned with Affinity Designer’s distortion capabilities. By comparison, CorelDraw’s vector distortion capabilities are limited, having just three options (Push/Pull, Zipper, and Twister), and are more like Illustrator’s Distort & Transform pulldown tools.
Shape Builder
This new addition allows you to combine or subtract basic shapes and segments to create a new shape. It approximates Illustrator’s tool of the same name combined with its Boolean Pathfinder operations. It’s nifty that Affinity Designer has some tools that combine two or more tools from other apps.
Measure and Area Tools
While competitive apps have ways to measure object dimensions outside of a CAD program (or Astute’s plug-ins for Illustrator), I know of none that can measure the area of a regular or irregular shape. But Affinity Designer can. In addition, the Area Tool can determine the perimeter and any segment length of a closed shape.
X-Ray View
While Illustrator has Outline View, it can’t do a split screen as Affinity Designer 2’s new X-Ray View can. It’s great not to have to go back and forth between views to check the skeleton framework of your work or select a specific curve, for instance.
My Wishlist for Serif’s Next Update
There is an almost-secret symmetry to Affinity Designer—I say almost because there’s no mention of it in the manual, and no obvious symmetry, reflect, rotate, or pattern tool. What you need to do is switch to the Pixel persona and select the Brush tool to summon a contextual menu where a mirror and symmetry axis tool resides. Remember, however, you are limited to a pixel layer, not vector.
A devoted symmetry tool within the Vector Persona would make my heart flutter. Even more fascinating would be a rotation and reflection pattern feature based on the 17 symmetries—sadly absent in Affinity Designer 2. What are the 17 symmetries? They are the different ways an image can be arranged to create a repeating pattern, also referred to as a wallpaper group, tessellation, or tile. Illustrator doesn’t yet have this feature, although it has a great multi-option pattern-making menu and the appreciated addition of rotation and reflected symmetry tools. I use XtreamPath 2’s Live Wallpaper (Crystalline Pattern) tool which has all 17.
Affinity Designer 2 Performance and Responsiveness
Another aspect that contributes to a pleasant user experience is the app's performance. Affinity Designer runs smoothly, even when handling complex projects. The latest update has improved performance further, making it even faster.
Mobile Performance
The delicious responsiveness of Affinity Designer 2 on the iPad or on a desktop with a stylus makes painting and sketching a delight. On both platforms, the app offers ten categories of vector brushes—Acrylic, Dry Media, Engraving, Gouaches, Inks, Markers, Oils, Pencils, Pens, and Watercolors—each having 12 fully editable individual brushes.
Affinity Designer’s brushes feel more like Adobe Fresco’s Live Brushes in that there is a visible molten lava flow that continues morphing the stroke until you pick up your stylus, finger, or cursor. This flow is controlled by adjusting the rope length stabilizer in the contextual brush parameters.
Affinity Designer has other performance improvements in terms of the displays it supports, the history it saves, and its zooming capabilities.
Displays
Got a super-fancy display? Good, because in addition to regular old monitors, EDR (Mac), and wide-gamut and HDR (Windows), Affinity Designer 2 powers Retina and the new Apple Expanded-gamut DCI-P3 displays.
History
We all make mistakes, and there’s no need to fret over them in Affinity Designer 2, which has you covered with 8,000 undo and history steps. Or, if you prefer, you can store document states as snapshots and even save your history so you can undo steps later—even on different computers. For added security, Cycle Futures protects your masterworks by preventing history loss if you edit from an undo (non-linear editing), and a seamless autosave protects against unanticipated disasters.
Zoom
Affinity Designer has a mind-boggling 1,000,000% zoom, which works smoothly and quickly.
Vector vs. Raster in Affinity Designer 2
It’s important to understand the practical differences between raster and vector files. Raster images are pixel-based and don’t enlarge well. Because they keep their original resolution, the pixels simply get larger when you scale them up, and that results in unsightly pixelated images. Raster file types include TIFF, JPG, PNG, and GIF. Vector files are defined by curves which makes them resolution-independent. This means that they are infinitely scalable without suffering a loss of quality. Vector file types include AI, EPS, and PDF, as long as the PDF doesn’t contain raster images.
With Affinity Designer you get cake and can eat it, too, because you can switch between vector and raster workspaces with the Persona panel. It's fantastic for softening typically crisp vector art with raster textures, and especially welcoming for folks whose workflow necessitates shifting between Illustrator and Photoshop. Note, however, that for a full-featured pixel-based Affinity application, you will need to look at Affinity Photo.
What Does Affinity Designer 2 Have that Other Design Apps Don’t?
There are plenty of features unique to this app, including Persona Duality, Measure, and Area Tools.
Shapely
As my eyes drifted down the stack of tools, I was delighted to find one sporting a wineglass icon—the transparency tool. Below that are the shapes, and I like that Affinity Designer 2 provides such a smorgasbord of shape options—13 more than the old standards you’ll find in Illustrator (that is, without Astute Graphics’ Dynamic Shapes plug-in), and most shapes have dynamic handles, meaning you can change the proportions of a star, arrow, or voice bubble, for example, without distorting the geometry.
Contour Tool
This path-offsetting tool is quite useful, and its live click-and-drag interface is so fun compared to the buried Illustrator drop-down dialog-box equivalent. What’s more, there are nine customizable parameters in the contextual toolbar, including Contour Type (Round, Bevel, or Miter) and Cap Style (None, Round, or Square).
Sharing, Export, and Backup in Affinity Designer 2
Once you've finished designing your graphics, you'll want to export them in the right format. Affinity Designer offers a wide range of export options, including SVG, PDF, and PNG. You can also export your design in different sizes and resolutions, making it easy to share your work on different platforms.
Affinity Designer also has excellent integration with other apps in the Affinity suite, including Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher. You can import and export files seamlessly between these apps, making it easier to create complex projects that include both vector and raster graphics. Plus, Illustrator users will be glad to learn that Affinity Designer 2 will happily open your native .AI files.
An Affinity for Designer 2
In recent years—and especially with the launch of Affinity Designer 2—Serif has established itself as a vector to be reckoned with in the world of graphic design software. Affinity Designer's powerful features and competitive pricing make it a compelling option for both new and experienced designers. It now earns a spot next to Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw as an Editors' Choice winner for the best graphic design software. Furthermore, if you’re sick of signing your life away with dozens of software and services subscriptions, Affinity Designer will be a welcome relief and worth every penny. Just remember that when Serif launches the next high-level update, you’ll need to pay for the upgrade.
If you're searching for a professional-grade vector graphics editor that’s gentle on your purse strings, Affinity Designer 2 is an excellent choice.
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