Affinity Designer is a standalone tool for designing and editing vector images, similar to Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW. It’s part of the Serif suite of creative tools, which also includes Affinity Photo (
see issue 367, p36
). It’s a one-off purchase at a reasonable £68 for Windows or macOS, making it a competitive option for those who don’t need Adobe’s heavyweight toolkit. It can import AI files created by Illustrator, and export in the industry-standard SVG and EPS format, which can be opened and edited in Illustrator or any other vector-editing application.
If you’d like to try it out for yourself, you can download a free trial from
serif.com.
How do I get it?
Designer has quite light system requirements and is available for Windows, macOS and iPadOS – see
tinyurl.com/368designer for full details of system requirements and OS support. It uses the same file format across all platforms, so you can hop freely between them while working on any number of projects, perhaps using a mouse at the desktop and an Apple Pencil on a tablet for complete flexibility.
While a licence lets you install the software on as many different devices as you like, it only covers one OS platform, so if you want to use a Windows PC and an iPad, you’ll need to pay £68 for the desktop licence, plus an additional £18 for the tablet app (available from the iPad App Store).
If you’re interested in using Serif’s other productivity apps – namely Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher – it’s worth considering a Universal Licence, which costs £160 for all three applications across all three supported platforms.
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S
hapes made easy with compound paths
Every shape in a vector document is made out of points, angles and Bézier curves, but if you want to create a specific outline then setting and adjusting all the angles and curves by hand can be a frustrating chore. One solution is to use the Pencil tool to draw your shape freehand, using the Stabiliser setting to keep it smooth.