As a jobbing graphic designer, I’ve been using Adobe’s Illustrator for well over 20 years to create vector graphics, logos and the like. While I still use an old version in my day job, using it at home has become untenable. I can stretch to £8 a month for the Adobe Lightroom / Photoshop subscription, but there is now way I’m willing to part with over £40 p.c.m. for the rest of the Creative Suite. 

I’ve been playing about with my own Ruanaich logo as well as recently being re-inspired by the likes of Aaron Draplin’s logo design. But I no longer have my own copy of Illustrator. 

I was thankful to come across Affinity Designer from Serif. Please let me also add, this is not a sponsored post (I wish). 

While no where near as feature packed as Illustrator, with time Affinity Designer looks like it will be a viable alternative, especially for simple logo jobs. It exports all the same formats and opens them too. I may even be able to produce small documents with it, rather than splashing out on InDesign in a month when I may have a small homer to do. 

As I write this, Affinity Designer is available for limited time on the Mac App Store for around £20, and that’s no subscription! Full price it was only around £40. 

It has great features of its own including saving the complete history with a document. It looks like a real boon for UI designers too. It’s available for Windows now and is expected on iPad in the future. 

Handling of shapes and tools can take some getting used to after a lifetime of Adobe Illustrator. 

Serif also have a Photoshop alternative in Affinity Photo, but I don’t think I’ll be free from Adobe until there is a descent alternative to Lightroom with its database and RAW handling capabilities. This may happen sooner than Adobe would wish.