Affinity Designer Opinion

[FFH Thü]

After some days with Affinity Designer, I began feeling comfortable. The work with swatches and path tool is doing okay. But there are two things that bother me:

Opening FreeHand files is pretty useless, because fonts do not appear and special objects like brushes do not either. Even Illustrator is able to do that correctly.

But the real deal breaker is Layers. Each object I create, each path, is on its own layer. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Then I have to go on and nest them into a sub group, and the whole mess of hundreds of layers is inside there and when I edit one path, it all opens inside the layer pallete to go to that layer. FOR WHAT? This is insane, honestly.

[FFH Thü]

The only way how to come about those completely stupid layers, is to ignore them. I put the layers palette away and just treat the handling as used from grouping. Funny thing, in the layers menu, they are also called groups and grouping, ungroup. Lucky me that even in FreeHand, I rarely used layers, so I am not really missing it. But the fact is: Affinity is missing real layers.

[Aspensound]

Why they just make it as it should be? Study Freehand and make their best app.

[FFH Thü]

Right. It is better than AI, and has things I missed in FH, but the GUI lacks intuitiveness.

At least I found a solution for opening FreeHand files. I open them in AI first, save as AI file (CS5.5) and Affinity Designer opens this perfectly including texts. Of course, things like brush-strokes are flattened into vector objects, but it looks the same.

[FFH Thü]

Despite some good experiences, after quiet some working with Affinity I gave it up now. Why? Beause the color swatches in Affinity do not link to the objects. This is a major flaw that makes Affinity designer useless.

It means, you set a swatch color then set one or several object fillings using that swatch from the palette. When later changing the color of that swatch, the colors in the objects do not change accordingly. They are therefore not linked to the swatch.

Well, they then explained to me that there are so called "global colors" who can do that. But its like eveything so far in Affinitys applications, you need to consult a thick manual first, before you understand the unnecessary complicated behaviour.

And there are many many other things in AfD I really did not like. The complicated handling of color palettes and setting of color swatches. The incoherrent behaviour of tool settings, specifically brushes, who sometimes repeat settings, but mostly do not. The difficult handling of path points and path manipulations, which always need many more steps then I am used to from FH. Missing of basic tools like straight line, distortion etc. It´s a long list so I decided to stick to FreeHand in Parallels and wait if maybe some years from now Affinity may be getting there. I made my inputs in their forum, but from the responses it seems they are stuck with the complicated handling of things as they think more like engineers then like creative users.

[FFH Mark]

Thü, I agree with your points about Affinity Designer. The color handling is awkward and needlessly complicated. Still using FreeHand here (Parallels) as my go-to app. I do open my files in Designer but they aren't overly complex and I add the .fh11 extension.

I also closed my Adobe CC subscription two months ago and so far maintaining well. InDesignCC is my most missed app but I am using an older version for now. Photoshop and Illustrator were easiest to replace with Affinity Photo and Publisher (beta) as well as older pre-CC versions of PS and IA.

[lovejoy]

Take a look at photopea.com for photoshop alternative - It is web based, but once loaded in your browser - you can work offline. It doesn't phone home or upload any data. I am amazed that it has as much power as photoshop for 1/100th of the size

[Atelier FM]

Corel Draw 2019?