Affinity Designer is also staggeringly cheap, and you only pay once: there’s no subscription. And the interface is similar enough that it’s easy to pick up and use intuitively.Ĭoded for the latest computers and tablets, makers Serif claim that Affinity Designer runs faster than Adobe’s products, and anecdotal evidence suggests that’s very much the case, as long as you're using relatively modern equipment. While some capabilities in Illustrator are absent, such as distortion or warp effects, most of what you can do in Adobe’s tool, you can do in Affinity Designer.
#BEST APP FOR GRAPHIC DESIGN ON MAC WINDOWS#
Since its release for Windows in 2016, Affinity Designer has offered PC-using professionals a grown-up alternative to Illustrator, including a complete vector and pixel editing toolset, 10 million per cent zoom, non-destructive effects and adjustment layers, and more. On the downside, its decades-old codebase and interface are becoming a little bloated and well, there’s that monthly subscription.
#BEST APP FOR GRAPHIC DESIGN ON MAC PLUS#
On the plus side, its ubiquity makes it a good tool to learn for your career, and the integration with the Creative Cloud can help make your workflow smooth and speedy.
More broadly, the issues that apply to Photoshop apply to Illustrator too. Illustrator has also now launched on the iPad, and the latest updates to this app in March and April make it much easier for you to share your work with colleagues and collaborators. The biggest addition of recent years have been a Freeform Gradients tool that makes it super-easy to create rich gradients, a Global Editing feature that lets you simultaneously make changes across all instances of a similar object, and a smart cropping tool that automatically suggests crops based on AI. That dominance is starting to ebb a little, with a rush of new rivals into the space. But it remains one of the most sought-after design apps for Windows.Īs with Photoshop, its rivals are largely competing on price, and for those whom money is less important than efficiency, Illustrator remains a hugely powerful and versatile tool, that Adobe is constantly making efforts to improve further. First launched in 1987, Illustrator has been the natural companion to Photoshop for generations of illustrators and designers, and it’s long been considered the standard vector drawing tool for the industry.