What with the Adobe CC subscription fiasco, my company is already looking for alternatives that we can use wherever it makes sense. Adobe, as part of their new subscription model, is trying to force us unto paying 40% more per seat than an individual license would cost. At that price we would be paying significantly more than we did when we just purchased upgrades. (We have upwards of 80+ seats.)
So far I have managed to push back and make Adobe give me the same pricing for new Teams seats as individuals pay. Not sure how long I'm going to manage that, however, as we are already in "special deal" territory.
We are at the point of using CC for nothing but interop with our customers and vendors wherever we can, and pushing our designers into using alternative tools wherever possible. If Adobe doesn't get their head out of their rear end, we will be buying less software from them, not more.
though I'm sure inkscape devs wouldn't refuse some funding, they aren't necessarily pimping their services for custom work on the project. It seems to be slowly evolving, so who knows how long it would take to get somebody who could code what he's after.
I think the most glaring omission stopping many people considering Inkscape a serious contender is colour support. Inkscape lacking CMYK support (& while we're at it, spot colour support) pretty much excludes it from a lot of print work. And this is coming from an Inkscape lover.
I have seen Affinity Designer put forward as a page layout competitor also, but this is naive. Just regarding color alone, it would need to be able to support multiple colorspaces in a single document and retain them in the resulting PDF. In the world of modern RIPs and digital printing, the RIP often handles colorspace conversion. Thus it is common to leave your source material in its original colorspace and tag the individual objects in a PDF with profiles.
And don't even get me started on how bad type is in the open source world (No, TeX is not an option in print).
There seem to be a bunch of Mac-only vector apps coming out in recent years.. Not just these direct Illustrator competitors, but HTML5 animation tools too like Hype, Paintcode, etc.. that provide vector drawing and animation tools, and are coming from small teams and cost very little (relatively speaking)...
Is this because there are more powerful native components in OS X that make it easy/easier to build this kind of application now?
Or did the whole Adobe thing just reach a critical mass of disgruntled-ness and this is the result?
When we started out Adobe was still sticking to their Flash guns. As HTML5 was the only method to make animated web content on iOS, it was clear someone needed to make tools aimed at graphic designers, so we decided that someone should be us! Luckily with no other competing apps around, we didn't have to deal with an uphill battle on feature parity unlike these vector editors do with Illustrator. So I wouldn't say we were disgruntled, just trying to fill in a hole. And, on a personal note I had a need for such a tool for a side project I was working on.
OS X is a great platform to develop for generally speaking. We naturally leverage WebKit, and Quartz and CoreImage frameworks I'm sure do a lot of heavy lifting for the vector-based tools. Also keep in mind a larger percent of graphic pros use a Mac than the general population, so if you're building a tool it is a safe bet to start on the Mac.
I do wonder though, how many people do you get asking for you to support Windows?
I know alot of Adobe shops that adopted Windows in previous years so I am just curious what the numbers are like.
We get maybe 2-3 requests a week for Hype on Windows. My napkin math estimates of potential customers (those that don't write in or saw our FAQ, and then would go on to buy) shows this might lead to lower double-digit percent income coming from a Windows port. This roughly corresponds with our site traffic, which is 18% Windows users.
My general thought is (at this time) we’d do better to develop enticing new features to expand our user base than doing a Windows/web port.
In my humble opinion, as a 20 year user of vector software, Sketch sucks for drawing. It has very interesting features, mostly for UI/UX design work, but drawing anything mildly complicated is a nightmare. I'm excited to try Affinity (later today, whenever I have a chance) because their example drawings look very complicated and nuanced.
…But maybe I am not a judge of good vector creative tools because I love Corel Draw and I miss it so very much since I switched to Mac.
Sketch is a bit nasty for freehand drawing. I'm very much not a Corel Draw fan, but loved Freehand when it was still around. Illustrator still lags Freehand of ten years ago in a lot of respects.
I'm not the guy you're replying to, but from my experience I think it is less a matter of features and more about different ways of doing the same thing. Basic stuff as how selection works (will the selection marquee select only the encompassing objects, every object it touches or a fragment of the object?) is very important when you are spending hours a day with a tool.
It could fit text to a region, transforms didn't require specific tools, it handled opacity properly, its bezier-editing tools were more refined, and a bunch of other things I'm probably forgetting.
Illustrator today has far more functionality (largely borrowed from Photoshop) than Freehand did, but Freehand had better core functionality than Illustrator (and it also introduced many of the features now in Illustrator, e.g. booleans).
Actually, if you're curious, just google freehand vs. illustrator -- it's pretty depressing how they compare despite freehand being 10 years old.
The bezigon tool for one, a more sensible and thought-out feel and flow, lots of small features that Just Worked. It's been a while so I can't comment further, but Freehand was a far better tool for me. Illustrator is more of a hodgepodge / mishmash / design-by-committee thing somehow.
So it isn't just me then. I just downloaded Affinity and within 10 minutes was as productive for core drawing tasks than I am in Sketch. Of course I miss the artboards and would like to see arbitrary export sizes (@0.5x etc.)
Great tool so far. I'm looking forward to using it more.
Sketch is focussed on UI designers. Affinity is focussed on illustrators. Different markets, with some overlap. In many ways, within the Adobe suite, Sketch is closer to Fireworks than Illustrator.
I think part of the reason you're seeing a bit of an explosion in apps, in addition to the general digruntled-ness with Adobe, is that Illustrator is one of those apps that is serving many different markets — not all of them well.
I think a lot of it is that Adobe's UIs have gotten so relentlessly fucked-up. They have their own cross-platform UI toolkit that always feels just a little wrong. And they keep on making things worse; the latest release of AI, for instance, has a truly horrible new font dropdown menu due to their desire to integrate a 'buy fonts on Typekit' button into what once worked quickly and elegantly.
I know that Mac users are very sensitive towards all cross-platform and non-native UI toolkits. I have always wondered why I haven't seen many complaints about the Adobe non-native UI on Mac. So, its interesting to hear that it does feel a bit wrong.
It's Adobe. Illustrator is buggy and inaccurate with UI flaws that have existed for years. Plus the subscription model really messed with pro indies who paid for CS. We're looking for a big change ASAP.
Really interested to see if this works. Most indie vector apps have not been ready for production use.
I understand your sentiment, but to be fair, the released product will have everything the website says it will. You're testing a beta version that may have any number of things missing at this point, so please don't judge too harshly as 'not playing straight'.
I could've included the current state of the AI/PDF import in the version you have - but it isn't ready yet, so instead of 'it doesn't import AI files' the comments would be 'AI files don't import properly' or 'why doesn't this attribute work?' because people may assume it's finished.
The personal info we ask for is nothing except an email address and your name so that we can send out updates about new betas - complete with an unsubscribe link.
This is a work-in-progress and it is very quickly evolving :)
AI and PDF compatibility will both be present in the product we launch with - which is what the website is trying to describe to interested potential users. The beta will also get these features very soon, so I don't see the problem?
We can't expect users to keep checking back on the website to see if we've added any new features that we always knew were going to be in the finished product but hadn't listed, just because they weren't finished yet, surely?
It's a sales site, deep down we understand why you did what you did and why you say what you say. We have all done it in the past. But there is always that dick that wants to pick a bone.
Don't worry about it. Though I would probably try be abit more upfront about the beta and the limitations of the beta at the download phase. After you have collected email addresses etc just let the user know this is indeed beta software and it's missing x, y and z.
Considering your early adopters are going to be more adventurous.. then it might make sense to post detailed release notes.
This serves a double purpose. It means you are upfront with your current users (likely to be your first paid customers) and it sets the tone for open communication.
Said tone is awfully important. It's the difference between "I'll report this bug and it will probably be fixed 2 weeks from now" and "F$#k it, these guys don't give a sh*t". Not to say the latter will necessarily happen but only that tone counts for alot when you are selling a tool that peoples livelihood may very well depend upon.
Best of luck anyways. I love working with graphics on the Mac and think your product is a welcome addition.
I think a lot of 'not ready for production use' is that Illustrator is a huge program that's old enough to vote with a zillion features, and pretty much every little feature is a dealbreaker for SOMEONE.
That said hey I'm certainly willing to give this one a try and drop some notes on them as to what my particular dealbreakers turn out to be. I'm betting it'll lack global color swatches, I've never seen anything besides AI do those and I love it.
I'm looking for something with solid EPS import and export. So far, I've found Sketch flakey (some things imported incorrectly, other things cause visual glitches), OmniGraffle great except when I export a document as EPS which has other EPS-imported elements embedded in it, they appear to be rasterised (which defeats the point). And that's pretty much it–Pixelmator, despite becoming more of a vector tool, doesn't support EPS at all. Inkscape works flawlessly except that it's awkward to use on a Mac, especially without retina support (which is somewhat crucial for an graphic editor).
I've just tried Affinity Designer and it seems like it has good EPS import support (all elements editable etc.) and EPS export, but the exported EPS appears rasterised. When I open it up again in Affinity Designer, it's no longer editable. But maybe I'm just doing something wrong...
There is a new experimental build of inkscape for osx which is slightly less awkward. Search for 'inkscape osx menu', it has been stable for me and you don't need to install an x server.
I think the types of EPS files you can create is expansive. Not sure if it means that it supports more features of illustrator such as filters and that, but it may do more than SVG for that reason. Also does SVG support CMYK? Because that's definitely something EPS is used for, trading CMYK vector files.
In my experience, EPS is far more preferable when it comes to print production workflow. I couldn't imagine sending anything else than a PDF or EPS to a printer for the first run.
Serif, the company behind this product, was founded in 1987. It's cool to see innovative new products from people who have been around for a while.
In the software business, too many companies older than a decade just end up milking their installed base forever with lame feature upgrades wrapped in an ancient GUI.
It's smart they going this direction, perhaps a result of them getting some key players in their staff. I haven't played with Serif since probably 2002. Back then the interface didn't seem all that smooth, but they do a lot of work in the education marketing area, so their products are probably evolving reasonably well. It's interesting your mention in the last sentence, because that's how Xara Designer Pro feels in a way for me after yet again buying their latest app. Where as they are adding useful things, some core stuff is still not addressed and GUI is a bit haphazard.
Just tried out the beta. I can't import Adobe Illustrator files yet (their forums says this is coming later). But otherwise it seems like a pretty good replacement. The panning and zooming is much better that AI. You can also use keyboard arrows to scroll through fonts and it shows up immediately, which is another thing about AI that has always annoyed me. I don't see any support for scripting (which I like to use to export icons), but it is a beta.
For myself and other creatives, the only thing really holding us to Mac and PC is Adobe. A complete design suite (illustrator, photoshop, dreamweaver, and indesign) would be a complete game-changer for the industry.
Dreamweaver is still, workflow-wise probably the most ideal app for doing HTML emails. When you construct something with dozens of nested tables, you do not want to work in the code, you want a clean split view that highlights across windows when something is selected. The best alternative is Pinegrow probably but it requires a specific html doctype that you may have to remove after the fact.
Plenty of designers (web and graphic) use DW on a daily basis. Some use it because they're just used to it, where as others need to use it because they can't hand-code.
If you want a tool like this for Windows, you want Xara Designer Pro probably. Or Serif does make Draw Plus and many other apps for Windows - http://www.serif.com/drawplus/
Anyone know the leading emulator (or similar) for running OSX programs on linux distros [Kubuntu in my case]? Is there even anything serviceable? I guess I'm after the WINE of OSX.
Looks good, but unfortunately I'm on Ubuntu, may use Win on a VM, but that's it! Such a pitty there's so many new tools like this coming out, but just for Mac. £37 is affordable
I'm very happy to see new alternatives to Illustrator and Photoshop emerge because they are both terrible tools for interface design.
Maybe I'm missing something but basic snapping doesn't seem to be working very well in this beta. With snapping enabled I still can't seem to easily draw rectangles that snap tightly to grid lines. I get locations that are all over the map instead. Sketch used to have this problem as well but they finally fixed it in version 3 and it was extremely frustrating to use for UI design before this was fixed.
So unless I'm missing something this is going to sit on the shelf until they get snapping really nailed down. Looks nice otherwise.
This reminds me of Mischief (for Mac and PC) [1], which is incredibly fast vector drawing application.
The way Mischief handles its details of graphics, speed and huge range of zoom is by using adaptively sampled distance fields (patented technology) [2].
It would be nice to know if Affinity Designer uses some advanced technology to achieve similar properties.
Mischief is a neat program, but it's kind of the opposite of this program — Mischief pretends pixels don't exist, whereas this program has a lot of pixel-centric features.
I am excited to see more application options in this space. Adobe has achieved a monopoly in creative circles with their applications, specifically Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign (and for a long time Flash and Acrobat as well). Flash is a great tool but the format was never really opened to other applications and now it's losing to HTML5. I do credit Adobe for opening up the PDF format, and it would be great if more standard formats could win out regardless of the application that created them.
In the long run, as has been pointed out, the rise of a lot of graphic software packages at this particular juncture has everything to do Adobe's current subscription model. Like many designers, I'm still forced to use Adobe at work because it is being advocated as "the industry standard."
At home, however, I've spent the last year looking for alternatives to InDesign and Illustrator. Ironically, the best two that were found were QuarkXPress (expensive, but had most of the features to equal what was being done in InDesign) and PagePlus, which was the one chosen (granted, it has to be either in a dual boot or in a virtual windows environment, but it does the job).
The problem when the Affinity Suite--most notably Affinity Publisher--finally comes to market is going to be getting commercial print shops to take their native files. Most shops work with hi-res PDFs now anyway, but for that 5-10% of jobs that need to be corrected within the native file(s), the shops are going to need to be able to open the file format. Currently, most professional print shops (in the states) take InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, PDF, QuarkXpress, and sometimes Freehand, Microsoft Publisher and CorelDraw files.
I submit two thoughts:
1) Affinity will need to allow Publisher to import and/or export .idml files so that previous users of InDesign can use their files in Publisher (the open-source program, Scribus, claims to have achieved .idml import currently in version 1.5 which is a developmental build) and export to an interim native file format that the commercial printing world can work with.
2) Affinity will need to go on a massive marketing campaign targeting printing vendors and extolling the virtues of adding Publisher to their armory of tools.
Having said all that--and currently being a PagePlus and DrawPlus customer as well as a proponent of the Designer beta--I can't wait until Affinity kicks Adobe's a$$.
By the way, as a Sketch user, Bohemian Coding's app seems to have been made to compete directly with Fireworks. Although it does work in vector, Sketch does not have the chops to fully compete with Illustrator (which is the territory that Designer fully stands in now). The only app that could have made that claim on OS X is/was Freehand (as DrawPlus, CorelDraw, Canvas, and Xara are all currently Windows-only).
I've been looking for an affordable Adobe Illustrator version for quite a while. I really hope this app will fill the gap that Adobe neglected (why is there a Photoshop Elements and no Illustrator Elements?)
As others have noted, tools like Pixelmater, Sketch and Inkscape each have their own problems, making them an unsuitable Illustrator replacement.
Serif has had a solid Windows vector drawing app (DrawPlus) for a long time. If I remember correctly, a group of ex-Xara developers moved to Serif to write it. Affinity looks similar, I would be surprised if they aren't based on the same codebase.
Zero shared code (am not a programmer but work at Serif). The Affinity stuff is brand new from the ground up developed over the last 4 yrs by a dedicated team.
You're right that some Xara devs added to DrawPlus over the years, but the Affinity titles are fr fr fresh and have different goals and philosophy.
Played with the beta for only 10 min but I was impressed with it. Easier and faster than Illustrator. Felt much less buggy than Sketch 3. AI file compatibility is a concern but looks very promising.
Pretty neat. I just tested it and feels quite smooth (less buggy and resource-hungry than illustrator). I'll stick to my CS, but I'll give it ago for some new projects...
Illustrator needs disruption, true. But Photoshop needs disrupt even more!
(And don't get me started on only two computers for the full subscription install!)
Yes sir. I thought Krita was going to be a good new alternative for Photoshop, being open source but sadly it's got basic things missing. You can't even nudge a layer using arrow keys you have to drag layer content with the mouse. Laggy too. GIMP is well, always GIMP. Paintshop Pro, Corel Draw, Painter those don't really hit the mark. UI is always just odd. I feel lost honestly. I'm glad I have cs6 master collection and plan on squeezing it for all I can over the next few years. I hate mucking around with Illustrator, though it's got some cool things it uniquely does. I use Xara Designer Pro for a lot of work. It's awesome and flexible but it's not gonna replace Photoshop.
Of course you can move a layer with the keyboard. You just need to configure that, because that's not the default. And it's not the default because our users tell us they prefer to pan with the arrow keys by default.
Photoshop's seeing some serious disruption in the comics scene; a LOT of people I know have been switching to Manga Studio 5ex and raving about how much better it is for basic painting/drawing, never mind extra domain-specific features PS will probably never have.
Also there are a fuckton of people trying to disrupt PS but very few stabs at Illustrator.
Absolutely. The Illustrator near monopoly has been a disaster for a lot of people in either the Freehand, Corel Draw or more esoteric areas.
It's mildly amusing this is back to Mac-only territory, given that the reason things like Xara were Windows only in the mid 90s was the logic of the era was design and publishing was going to become a Windows NT stronghold, which underestimated the stickiness of custom AppleScript and Quark XTensions.
Try Creature House Expression. Until MS acquired the company, it was the best alternative to Illustrator out there, with features way beyond anything Adobe could offer.
Last I checked, Microsoft were still offering both Windows and Mac versions as free downloads. The Mac version doesn't work on modern OSX, but the Windows version is awesome - and it works perfectly on WINE too.
Note that this is professional software, with an 'appropriate' learning curve. I love the user interface. The manual is friendly, comprehensive, and very well illustrated.
Sure, why shouldn't you be able to create game graphics? As long as you can export rasterized images I see no limitations on what you could or could not create with a vector illustration software.
Could you elaborate why Sketch didn't work out for you?
Although surely inferiour in some ways for now, Inkscape is more useful to me because it's open and runs on all of my computers, it also has a usable plugin system, a userbase...
The dictionary defines Alternative as: one of two or more available possibilities. This is available, and it is a possibility, even if it's a possibility with a low probability based on your inherent bias. So, by definition, in english, this is certainly an alternative. So I'm curious about your motivation for the comment. You come out swinging, create a strawman, and introduce an error, all in one sentence. You're either a troll, or you're an idiot, and I'm honestly curious which, because I would like to assume the former, but your post makes no sense, even as a troll message. What was your motivation?
Can people please stop saying strawman over and over and over again. We get it, you read about it on Wikipedia by way of Reddit and now it applies to every single time someone disagrees with you.
I was trained in debate and logic long before Wikipedia existed, actually, long before the web existed. I'd rather you appeal to people against serving up logical fallacy up as substantive material for discussion.
By your logic, it should be safe to describe surviving on a concentrated stream of spiritual energy emanating from the Godhead as an alternative to eating food, even if it's only available to the 12 Ascended Masters.
Saying that this is only an alternative on a Mac is not trolling, not a strawman, and not an error, it's a clarification that people looking at thread titles to click on might appreciate. You're either a troll, or you're an idiot, and I'm honestly curious which, because I would like to assume the former, but your post makes no sense, even as a troll message. What was your motivation?
Since spiritual energy cannot sustain life, and it's inconceivable that it ever could (there are no such masters, but there is indeed Apple computers for less than $500), life energy is not a possibility, where Apple clearly is for the vast majority of designers. A Tesla car is not a personal alternative for me, I make too little, but I would be an idiot to say that a Tesla wasn't an alternative to a vast majority of Americans based on their actual usage.
I suspect that the reason that apps like this and Sketch are Mac-only is that the OS X provides APIs like Quartz and CoreGraphics that do a lot of the heavy lifting for drawing apps. So there's a lot less code to write for an app like this.
Affinity supports RGB8/16, CMYK and Lab colour spaces - but Quartz/CoreGraphics does not. We needed to make sure we produced a pro level application - which necessitates pro colour support so there's no way to do this if you're limited to what the OS provides: That's why we have our own renderer which took a lot of development to make so powerful and fast.
Illustrator runs on Windows and Mac, this runs on PC. I don't have a PC, nor do I want one, so this is unusable.
Now tell me about how design has to be done on a and how the MS operating system on the computer helps you do it.
So far I have managed to push back and make Adobe give me the same pricing for new Teams seats as individuals pay. Not sure how long I'm going to manage that, however, as we are already in "special deal" territory.
We are at the point of using CC for nothing but interop with our customers and vendors wherever we can, and pushing our designers into using alternative tools wherever possible. If Adobe doesn't get their head out of their rear end, we will be buying less software from them, not more.