The brush tool has a number of different tricks too.

As well as regular colour fills, transparency and gradient fills can be applied to objects and customised, and the appearance of objects can be saved as styles, ready to apply to other items. These can be kept as customisable ‘smart’ shapes or converted to regular curves and worked on with the Node tool, the equivalent of Illustrator’s Direct Selection tool.

Draw a cog object and you can adjust the number of teeth as well as their width, depth, and angle of cut. The shape drawing tools have eighteen different custom types on top of the basic rectangle, oval and rounded rectangle objects, each with a broad range of specific customisation options. In use, Affinity Designer is surprisingly fully-featured. The interface is well considered, with tools and features presented in a logical and convenient manner If you’re making print graphics leave this off and objects appear sharp at all zoom scales, but turn on one of the pixel-based view modes and you see exactly how the work will appear in bitmap form at the document’s current resolution setting. In a nod to today’s high resolution Mac screens there’s a Retina Pixel View mode, which doubles the pixel pitch of the regular Pixel View mode. These help you work on different parts of a project without having to rearrange windows or move toolbars manually. The device size presets include iPads and iPhones as well as a couple of Nexus models, two Kindle Fire sizes, and the Galaxy S5, or you can set up your own custom dimensions if you prefer.Īffinity Designer has three ‘personas’ one for drawing and shape creating, one for pixel-oriented painting, and one for exporting, with features for creating sliced parts of designs and generating images at different resolutions. Documents can be set up for a number of different destinations: print, with different paper size presets, a ‘press-ready’ version of print for commercial production, photo (where the page size presets are photo print sizes), web, and ‘devices’ if you want to create work to fit phones or tablets. There are very few really good vector drawing packages around for the Mac, in part because Adobe’s Illustrator rules this particular roost, but Affinity Designer, Serif’s first foray into the world of Mac software, looks like it could shake things up in very interesting ways.įrom the start it’s clear that Affinity Designer has big ambitions.

Serif affinity designer 2019