5 things Affinity Designer really needs
Since its 2014 release, Affinity Designer has been regularly updated and improved — version 1.86 as of writing — and is now a true contender to industry-standard vector illustration app Adobe Illustrator.
I’ve been spending a few weeks using Affinity exclusively in place of Adobe Illustrator to see if a permanent transition is viable. After a bumpy start, and much googling of, “How do I do _____ in Affinity Designer, I quickly gained speed navigating the sometimes-fiddly and dated UI.
And now? I love Affinity Designer. If I cancelled my Adobe CC suite tomorrow, I’d be calm in the knowledge I could continue my work. But there’s no such thing as perfect; a few niggles are holding me back.
So here are 5 things I personally think Affinity Designer needs to win me over:
1. A Spiral tool
The shape tools in Designer are fantastic. Like Illustrator, you have your polygon tool and star tool, but you also have a doughnut and pie tool, and a Segment Tool that I found myself using more than I imagined I would. And who hasn’t needed a quick love heart or cog from time to time?
But what if I need to draw a spiral? No such luck. And a spiral can’t so easily be constructed like many other geometric shapes. For some reason, Serif doesn’t think such a tool is needed.
On the Affinity Designer forums, requests for a spiral tool have been met with responses from users such as, “This is how you draw a spiral…” to, “Import one from Illustrator.” Erm, thanks?
2. A Shape builder
Once you start using the Shape Builder in Adobe Illustrator, you can’t imagine not having it. Designer does have the equivalent of the Pathfinder Tool, but it doesn't come close to Shape Builder when you want to join or exclude a series of complex overlapping objects.
3. Ability to select all objects by their properties
This one really throws me. When altering a complex illustration, I like to be able to select all strokes or fills with the same colour so I can quickly recolour them without the need to manually select each one — no easy task when your artwork has 100s of objects.
But this fundamental feature found in Adobe Illustrator is absent in Designer. It’s baffling to me. And I hope Serif add the functionality soon.
Update: As of version 1.9.0 this feature has now been implemented.
4. Click-and-delete path sections
To delete a path section in Adobe Illustrator, you simply need to click the section and hit delete. Simple.
In Designer, you must select the node tool, select a node, click the Break Curve icon, select the node at the other end of the section, click Break Curve again, select the now-separated section and hit delete.
Yes, it’s a pain. I’m sure there must be some rationalisation for this process, but I’ve yet to figure it out.
5. A modern UI
It's ok. It's fine. It does the job. But the spindly, semi-colourful UI feels behind the curve. Sure, you can customise the toolbars, though it's not easy decided which icons you wish to relegate to the menu.
Many icons are ambiguous, and even after weeks of using Designer, I still have to look up which one does what, or click-it-and-see. This may simply be a case of there being many functions that can’t clearly be represented by a tiny graphic.
Serif need to take a leaf out of Adobe’s book and drop the colour icons. Clear, monochromatic, consistent icons win the day, especially in an interface this laden with features.
Conclusion
I really do think I could use Affinity Designer as my sole vector illustration app. It even has features that excel Adobe Illustrator’s functionality, and I’ll talk about those in a future article.
But until Serif make these few improvements, I’m hesitant to fully commit.
Thanks for reading, and feel free to comment on what you love/hate about Affinity Designer.
