Affinity Designer might give Adobe a bit of a headache

affinity-designer-logo Many of us have reluctantly signed up for the Adobe Creative Cloud because .. well .. because there’s not much of an alternative. A monopoly is a monopoly and monopolists have the tendency to take what they think is theirs.

This might be changing right now. A few days ago, Affinity Designer has emerged. It’s a vector program that works remarkably well. You get to switch between three different modes (they call them “persona”): vector, pixel and export. It’s fast, it’s small and it seems really well programmed.

While that in itself is all great, here are a few more goodies:

Affinity is planning to release two more products: Photo and Publisher. If the quality of Designer is any indication on what’s to come, Adobe might have a bit of a problem on their hands. I’m serious. This thing is speedy and fun to work with. Watch the video on their home page, after playing with Designer on my 2012 Macbook Air, I can confirm that what they demo in the video isn’t sped up.

And then there’s the pricing model: bye bye subscriptions. Affinity Designer is $39.99 (20% discounted launch offer until Oct/9/2014) and if you buy it, it’s yours to keep.

Oh, and did I mention that they support Mac OSX 10.7 and up? So my old 2007 Mac Pro can play too!

I’m convinced. Bring on the Photo and Publisher!

ยป more information

Update:
The more I rummage around in Designer, the more little delightful things I discover. For example the non-destructive boolean operations (hint: select two shapes, click the boolean toolbar icons while holding down the Alt/Option key) and then I found this in the help file: the Affinity Cat

Author: Chris Marquardt

Chris Marquardt is an educator and podcaster. He wrote Wide-Angle Photography and is the co-author of The Film Photography Handbook and Absolut analog. He's the host of this podcast and a few others. Chris teaches photography all over the world. He is a regular on the TWiT Network.