Michal Ždanský Last year, the developers from Serif released a very ambitious graphic editor Affinity Designer, which has a great chance of becoming a replacement for Adobe graphics applications for many, especially with the upcoming two applications Affinity Photo and Publisher. Today saw the release of the second major update to Designer, which has been available in public beta for App Store owners for several months. There are a lot of new features and changes, some of which users have been calling for for a very long time and whose absence has often been an obstacle to the transition from Photoshop and Illustrator.
The first major innovation is the corner editing tool. Rounded corners had to be created manually in the previous version, now the application has a dedicated tool for creating rounded corners in any bezier. Rounding can be controlled by dragging the mouse, or entering a specific value, either in percentages or in pixels. The tool even displays a circle at each corner to guide rounding. However, the functionality does not end with round corners, you can also choose beveled and bitten corners or corners with inverse rounding.
The second important new feature is "Text on Path", or the ability to specify the direction of text by vector. The function is solved quite intuitively, just select the text tool and click on the object, according to which the direction of the text will be guided. In the toolbar, it is then easy to determine on which side of the curve the path of the text will lead. Also in the update you will find the ability to create a dashed/dotted line, which is also one of the things that had to be solved either by manually creating many vector dots or dashes or with a custom brush.
Big changes also took place in exports. In the previous version, it was only possible to export the entire document to vector formats, the cut-outs only offered export to bitmaps. The update finally allows parts of graphics to be cut into SVG, EPS or PDF formats, which UI designers will especially appreciate. After all, the UI design was also supported in the application by a new pixel alignment option, when activated, all objects and vector points will be aligned to full pixels, not half pixels, as was the case in the previous version.
In the new version 1.2, you will also find other small improvements, for example, the option to save the history of changes with the document, localization to German, French and Spanish has been added, the typography menu has also received minor changes, color management and the user interface has become closer to the design of OS X Yosemite. The update is available for free to existing Affinity Designer users, otherwise the app is available for purchase 49,99 €.
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Great and accessible property. I recommend!
I'm keeping my fingers crossed for them, they need some quality replacement for the excellent but overpriced adobe. Otherwise, do you know if it still does the thing that when I import a drawing from Illustrator, the outlines are torn off into a separate object?
so try the 10-day trial version…
https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/designer/trial/
I've been using Affinity Designer for a few months now, and I can't say enough good things about it (except for a few missing features that this update offers). Fine.