Item: Affinity Designer
Rating: 10
Author: Laura Glover

Overall Satisfaction with Affinity Designer

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use the Affinity Designer program for all of our graphic design work across our client projects and marketing metrials. It's our favourite program for creating logos, vector illustrations, and custom icon sets. It's most useful for anything that requires scalable vector artwork like large banners, brand identities and even web graphics.

Pros and Cons

Pros

creating vector graphics
manipulating shapes and curve tools
vector brush strokes
Exporting persona

Cons

tracing tools
graphs and charts
pattern generator

Return on Investment

Budget-friendly alternative to Adobe suite
Efficient workflow
Handles my professional design needs

Usability

Coming from Photoshop and Illustrator, the transition was pretty smooth and most tasks translates well. There was a bit of a learning curve with certain tasks, like masking images, but nothing too steep. The align tools are excellent and the use of personas (especially the Export persona) adds a lot of functionality when exporting slices or working with different formats. The interface is user friendly with frequently used tools easily available

Alternatives Considered

Adobe PhotoShop and Adobe Illustrator CC

Affinity Designer stacks up really well against Illustrator, especially for the kind of work I do. While Illustrator might have more niche features that Affinity does not but It does covers the core functionality I need for vector design. And without the ongoing subscription cost.

I chose Affinity Designer primarily because it's a one-time purchase, which makes a big difference for my small business.

Key Insights

Do you think Affinity Designer delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Affinity Designer's feature set?

Yes

Did Affinity Designer live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Affinity Designer go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Affinity Designer again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Affinity Photo, Affinity Publisher, Clipchamp

Likelihood to Recommend

It's well suited for projects that rely heavily on vector graphics, like logo design, icon sets, and any branding work where scalability is required. I've also used it for things like social media assets and print layouts. So to have branding consistency across formats within one file. The one-time purchase is a big plus, especially for small studios or freelancers who dont have a large software budget.
It's not ideal for if you're working in a team that relies heavily on Adobe Creative Cloud for collaboration.

Comments

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