Inkscape User Reacts To Affinity Designer

[Music] in a recent video I made comparing Inkscape and illustrator I went over some of the things I both liked and disliked about each and one of the most common responses I got was to make a comparison between Inkscape and affinity designer and this is not that an isolated incident by any means a lot of you guys have been asking me about affinity for a while now so I recently decided to pick up a copy of it and check it out for myself if you don't know what affinity designer is it's a vector graphics editor similar to Inkscape and illustrator and it's developed by a company known as serif unlike Adobe's subscription-based pricing model affinity designer is just a one-time purchase and you're done you get to own the software as opposed to being forced to rent it like you are with illustrator from what I can tell affinity seems to fit in the middle between both Inkscape and illustrator on one end of the spectrum you have the expensive industry standard that's used professionally in institutions like universities and design agencies then on the other end of the spectrum you have a free and open source alternative that can be used by hobbyists and anyone looking to familiarize themselves with vector design affinity sits right in the middle it has the features and support that you would expect from a professional piece of software but at the same time it comes with the price tag that makes it accessible for almost anyone based on their website it looks like it normally sells for about 50 US dollars but they had it on sale when I was checking it out so I was able to grab a copy for $25 and just to clarify this is not a sponsored video I'm not being paid to promote this product and I don't have any affiliate links to promote I'm making this video because you guys have mentioned this and asked me about it for so long now that I just had to check it out as someone who has been using Inkscape professionally for over a decade I'm going to give you my first impressions of affinity in this video but to be fair I haven't really had enough time to get my hands dirty with the software and learn all of its quirks and nuances just yet so this is by no means a proper review this is more or less the first impression coming from someone who has logged countless hours into both Inkscape and illustrator so as you can see here I have affinity opened up on my screen and my first impression is that it looks a lot like illustrator but it functions more like Inkscape let me show you what I mean here we have this window that allows us to set up a new document and one of the first things I noticed is that you can choose to work in the CMYK color space this is so refreshing as an Inkscape user because unfortunately Inkscape is incapable of producing CMYK documents so this is a very welcome feature if you're someone who regularly designs things for print once you've set up your new document you'll see that a lot of the canvas navigation functions are a lot like Inkscape you can move the page around by pressing down the mouse wheel and moving the mouse and you could zoom in and out by holding ctrl and rolling the mouse wheel up and down one thing I did notice though is that pressing 1 on the keyboard will not set your view back to a hundred percent like it does in Inkscape you'll have to press ctrl ends want to do that looking over here at the left side of the screen you can see all of your tools which is pretty common for design software a lot of these are tools that you would find in Inkscape like the Select tool the nodes tool and the pen tool one tool that I really find interesting is the corners tool which allows you to manually adjust the types of corners your object has you can make them rounded squared concave straight and even cut off another tool I was happy to see is the artboards tool similar to what illustrator has this allows you to manually create documents with multiple pages something that ink escapes SVG format is incapable of unfortunately to the right of the tools menu you'll see another menu for assets like pre-made icons and other graphical items like overlays I could see this being useful sometimes but I don't know that I would leave this menu here by default it seems more like something that you would only use once in a while so I'd rather it not be there taking up screen space all the time much like Inkscape you'll find the settings for each tool in the top toolbar here and what I really like about this is how easy it all is to understand if you're already familiar with Inkscape or illustrator it won't take you very long to look at these icons and figure out what they are you have these buttons over here which are for raising and lowering objects these buttons over here allow you to flip and rotate objects and over here you have a little flyout menu for aligning your objects then if you come over here you'll notice another flyout menu for enabling snapping represented by a little icon which i think is pretty clever finally over here to the top right you have what's known in Inkscape as path operations where you can unify subtract intersect exclude and divide your objects and I really like that these are interface buttons that you can click on and you don't have to navigate through a drop-down menu in order to get to them let you do an ink scape on the right hand side of your screen you'll see some more menus one of which is for coloring your objects when it comes to coloring affinity is more like illustrator in that you have to choose your filling stroke colors independently by toggling between two settings whereas an Inkscape you can simply click on a color to use it as your fill color and then shift-clicking a color will allow you to use it as your stroke color to the right of the color tab you'll see another tab that allows you to pick colors by using swatches if you prefer to do it that way and then over here you have your stroke tab this is nearly identical to the stroke settings in Inkscape but one thing I really like about this is that there's a slider for adjusting your stroke size which is really cool I've always found it annoying that I have to manually type in numbers just to change the stroke sizes in Inkscape and illustrator this is a new and refreshing take that I would love to see implemented in both Inkscape and illustrator finally over here to the right you have a collection of brushes you can use just like an illustrator unfortunately Inkscape doesn't have a brushes feature but there is a workaround for copying custom objects to your clipboard and using them to brush with like I did in a previous tutorial navigating down here to the center you'll see a layers menu and one thing I find interesting about affinity is that every single object you create is automatically placed on a new layer of its own this seems like it could be a double-edged sword though on one hand it's nice to have an index that you can look at and see where everything is positioned but on the other hand if you're someone who likes to work with the layers then this is going to be outright chaos because it'll be nearly impossible to keep your layers organized if there's no way to disable this feature looking over here to the right of the layers tab you'll see a tab for your standard effects like Gaussian blurs bevels shadows and glows there's another tab for styles to choose from a tab for editing your text objects and finally a tab for stock photos and from what I can see it looks like it links up with a site called unsplash down here you'll see a transform menu that displays an object's width height and its position on the X and y axis there's even a display that in two kate's to what degree you're rotating or shearing an object and just like an Inkscape you can change all of these settings manually with exact numbers if you'd like over here you have a history menu that displays all of your most recent actions in case you'd like to go back and undo many of them and then finally there's a navigator tab which gives you a snapshot of your viewfinder in relation to the canvas after using a Finiti designer for a little while I've come across a few things that I really like about it one of which would be the indicator that appears when selecting objects as you click and drag over an object to select it a blue indicator will highlight the object to let you know that you've selected it I really like that because there's been times in Inkscape where I thought that I had selected an object but I didn't it's nice to have an indicator like this that lets you know for sure another thing I like about affinity is how well it handles gradients in my comparison video between Inkscape and illustrator I mentioned that one of the things I've always liked better about in scape is how much easier it is to work with gradients than it is in Illustrator and the same can now be said for affinity designer it's processed for editing gradients is just as intuitive as it is in Inkscape another thing I like about affinity is how easy it is to browse through your font library when working with text much like illustrator affinity gives you a simple drop-down menu with all of your fonts as you browse through them and hover your cursor over different fonts your text will show a preview on the canvas of how it would look in that particular font this is an area where unfortunately Inkscape falls short browsing through your fonts and Inkscape can be tedious and frustrating at times finally there's something inexplicable about affinity that just feels right it's almost as if you took the intuitiveness of Inkscape and combined it with the crisp and smooth nature of illustrator the more that I use this program the more that I want to keep using it for all of my vector work in the limited amount of time that I've spent using this software I did come across a few things that I wasn't crazy about one of which would be the automatic spell checking squiggly red lines are automatically displayed under misspelled words I would find this to be incredibly annoying if I were designing a logo where you're working with brand names that aren't always in the dictionary I'm sure this could be easily disabled but in my opinion it should be disabled by default this is meant to be a design application not a desktop publisher spell checking is something that can always be done later on after the design work is finished another thing I noticed with affinity designer is that it has some kind of odd screen rendering where objects become pixelated as you zoom in and out and I also noticed a bit of screen tearing as well this could have something to do with my graphics card but either way it's not that big of a deal it's just an odd behavior that I haven't seen an effective program before finally there's a few features from illustrator that I'm a little disappointed to not see in affinity as well like the shape builder tool the envelope deformation feature and some 3d effects I can overlook these features not being included in Inkscape because for one they're not essential for vector design and to escape is freeware that was made by volunteers you can't expect it to have all of the extensive features you would find in the industry standard software however when it comes to something that you're paying money for I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a little more and because of that I kind of feel like affinity has an identity crisis it doesn't yet have the features needed to overtake illustrator in the professional world but at the same time if you're just a hobbyist or someone who occasionally needs vector design as an ancillary part of your work I don't really see much here in terms of added benefits that would make it worth paying for as opposed to just using Inkscape that being said affinity is still very young and it still has a long way to go but I'm really excited to see how this software develops over time in the future although it's not quite ready to dethrone illustrator just yet it's not very far off and if I were Adobe I would at least be a little concerned I really like what I see from affinity and I'll be using it a lot over the coming weeks and months maybe I'll even do a proper review in the future once I blog some more hours let me know what you guys think in the comments below have you used the Finity and if so how do you like it more importantly would you be interested in seeing affinity toriel's on this channel once I become a little more proficient with it finally before I end the video I just have to plug my Inkscape master class for those of you who may be interested in learning a little more about how Inkscape works it's a collection of over 60 videos where I go over every tool and feature in Inkscape and I explain what it is and demonstrate how it works I'll have a link in the description of the video if you want to check that out if you have any questions just leave a comment below and as always thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 227,806

Rating: 4.9431696 out of 5

Keywords: inkscape affinity, logos by nick, nick saporito, logosbynick, affinity designer

Id: tksmvr9f17w

Length: 11min 10sec (670 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 09 2020