Nate ：Still, not being stuck with Adobe is nice.
As a former professional user of the complete Creative Cloud using it daily for years I didn't miss Illustrator nor Photoshop one single day and the money saved, the fact that I own the software, but also that Serif, who makes these products, actually responds within a day on their forum and actually thinks with you, still makes me happy every time. Try to 'talk' to Adobe via their forum... that's impossible. With Adobe you are treated like just a number, even paying 60 euros every single month for many years.
Also most (large) companies don't realise that when they stop using Adobe they cannot open up any of their files anymore. Adobe doesn't even provide a viewer for files like PSD or AI, so you cannot even view all the files you created in all these years being a loyal customer.
Than, when you want to leave Adobe they try to let you pay a huge fee of all months you, in their eyes, should have payed 'till the end of the year. That's legally very questionable at least. Than you have to jump through all kinds of hoops to get the customer service to even end your subscription, as they've hidden that from their website. Than suddenly they offer you to have a free month, just to let you stay. So while you were a loyal customer you didn't get any service, but when you try to leave they offer you a free month?! And when you stick by your plan to leave they even start adding it up to more free months. It's rediculous. So they won't let you go easily, your files are taken hostage by them and you pay 60 euros a month a company-user, without even once getting service by them or even an easy response on their forum. And when leaving they want to punish you with a fee...
I had to be very consistent and refused to pay that stupid fee as they don't have any legal ground to have the right to do that. Than, when staying consistent in that you would like to leave, having chatted with some callcenter in India acting like being Adobe, for over half an hour to an hour, they finally let you leave without having to pay the fee.
After these experiences and the real face of Adobe showing up, like me, everyone I know that left Adobe had the same experience and will NEVER go back to that trap.
Yes, Designer has little things they need to fix and add, but nothing I cannot do without. On the other hand Designer has A LOT of things Illustrator never had. It's build from the ground up, so no cluttered interface, is incredibly fast and very intuitive. Also working isometric is great in Designer as they have realtime isometric tools to work directly in an isometric grid with planes (like front, side or top)!! In that mode you can put shapes like circles directly unto an isometric plane without even having to think about isometric, you just draw on another side! That was a pain in Illustrator. Also everything in Designer is real time. No 'preview'-buttons to show some result. Than they have non-destructive boolean operators, a history with a fader to navigate throught the history which is amazing and even branches in the history (just like working with git). So you are working with a customer next to you and you can try things out, go back in history with a slider to a certain state, try another road with different colors/shapes/whatever (creating a new branch from that history state) and still can go back in time with the history-slider and go back to the first future-road from that history point. That's powerfull stuff.
Than there's the export persona which has a watcher!! So when that's turned on all changes you make to a design automatically gets exported the way you configured it. And this is just touching the surface as there's way more.
Next to Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer there's also Affinity Publisher (like Indesign). And having all three packages things get even crazier. As all three software programs use the exact same fileformat!! So you can open up a file created in Photo in Designer or visa versa, but also in Publisher. No conversion or import or silly things; it's exactly the same file format you just open up in another program with a different UI and tools.
And having all three the programs opens up maybe the best feature of them all:
From within Publisher you can switch to Photo and Designer, just like you would open Affinity Photo or Affinity Designer, but all within the same program!! As Photo and Designer are all build in the same codebase, so Publisher had both programs in there. So you're not actually switching programs, but stay in the same software with the same file.
So in reality this means: you open up Publisher, create your page-based layouts (for example for web-/app-design or a pdf), than you need to add and edit photo's, so you just switch to the Photo-persona (which turns the interface into Affinity Photo) and edit photo's in the same interface. Than you need vectorwork and you switch to the Designer persona and the UI changes to Designer. Still all in the same software. And if you save that Publisher-file, it is the same file as a Designer-file or a Photo-file. So you can still open up that file in either Photo or Designer. For example, to use the spine batch export available only in Designer. Not one time you need to switch to another application, not one time you need import or export. So this is an incredibly fast way of working.
Sorry for the long story and the rumbling, but as most people that went to Affinity, I'm very enthousiastic about it and use it happily every day without the fear of losing my own creations by not paying a subscription, so your files are taken as a hostage, and knowing I save 60 euros every month to spent on other things.
BTW Affinity is pretty good in opening AI files and does a pretty decent job in importing PSDs too. Also Publisher will or is already able to open up Indesign-files. Only if a file uses closed-source parts in the file Adobe protects (and Adobe changes this often so competition cannot open the files...) cannot be imported exactly the same. But as far as importing AI-files go with my files I've never had any issue. Which is pretty great work.
Last Adobe day I've saw all features were just silly things, but also things Adobe now put in their software as seen from Affinity that Affinity had for years. While on the other hand the Serif Affinity keynotes were so full of new actually useful features that they couldn't even show them all in the key note.
I can go on forever. Needless to say I would recomment this to everybody! 🙂
