Choosing Your Design Software Like A Pro

Hey there! I’m back with another article on how to carefully choose your professional design tool. In this article, I’m going to cover two very powerful graphic design software: Affinity Designer and Adobe Illustrator. To understand these two products, I would liken them to Designer being the cool new startup, while Illustrator being the incumbent. Oh, do take note that both of these are paid — there are no free versions (although some may dispute this). This is a in-depth review to help you spend your dollars wisely, so skip to the end if you’re just in for a casual read (The TL;DR Chart)!

If you want a quick visual intro to Affinity Designer, check out their promo video below.

1. Pricing

I’ll talk about pricing first because you and I know that creatives are, unfortunately, paid lesser than many other fields. Let’s dive into the pricing models of each piece of software.

Adobe Illustrator is part of the Creative Cloud Suite, and they have a varied pricing model depending on your role. If you’re a freelancer or just happen to work individually, it’s going to cost you a whopping S$69.72 per month, for a total of S$836.64 per year – per license, for 2 desktop devices. You can get it as an individual app for S$27.62/mo (S$331.44/year), but I highly doubt people use Adobe products in silo. If you work in an organization with a Teams license, it’s approximately S$119.00/mo, but since you won’t be paying for it directly, it’s not going to be a big deal. If you’re a student that’s going to graduate but still possess your .edu email account, you can get the subscription at a steal: it’s S$26.30/mo (S$315.6/year) – an absolute steal.

Affinity Designer, on the other hand, is so affordable that I would almost advise to get it just for fun. It has been a one-time purchase since launch, and you get unlimited updates forever. Of course, this business model is bound to change. Just take a look at Sketch, which offered the app at US$99 one-time purchase initially, then switched to an annual subscription once businesses started picking it up. Until then, it’s an amazing investment at S$34.98 (this is after a 50% discount during the COVID season).

At this price point, wouldn’t it make sense for all designers to drop whatever they’re using and move to Affinity Designer right away? Hold up — I did just that, and let me help you get a clearer picture in the following points below.

Winner: AD

2. Capabilities

Affinity is no slouch, in fact, it’s on steroids in many aspects! But many designers have been building their workflows, muscle-memory and asset archive around a certain app ecosystem. I would go as far to say that Adobe Illustrator (known as AI going forward) is more of a generalist while Affinity Designer (AD) leans towards more of a specialist. Here are some of the things that make each app shine.

Affinity Designer (AD):

1. Has superior isometric capabilities hands down. You'll know the frustration working with isometric in AI if you've tried it before. I created the header image you see above in just less than 10 minutes while using it for the first time!
2. Is able to creating clipping masks over other vectors/rasters with just layer drag-and-drop (love this)
3. Has many non-destructive object transformation/alignment features (e.g. centre objects vertically and horizontally, and undo it later, remembering their previous locations)

Adobe Illustrator (AI):

1. AD is sorely missing the compound path feature. It uses groups, which doesn’t play well when brought outside the app. More on that later. AI fully supports this and is able to create super complex compound paths, even if they aren’t joined.
2. The vector handling is way more capable than AD, and even other apps that I won’t mention here. Exporting SVGs or EPS files from AI saves the dimensions of the file, so it will import as the absolute size you’ve set it to be.
3. Expand/Contract functionality is important to me. This isn’t available in AD. Display text not thick enough? Expand it after outlining your text. Using strokes is a workaround but doesn’t achieve the same result.
4. Anyone who has used CS5 and above might have heard of the shape builder tool. It's a simple visual representation of combining and subtracting from vectors. Rather than having to actually think about the math of Unite/Subtract/Intersect, you just have to draw over regions to merge or remove.
5. The Recolor Artwork feature in AI is also something that was sorely missed in AD. Imagine having to select each colour in your vector/logo/icon, and recolouring them step by step. With this tool, you can reduce the colours or just replace them en masse. Saves you hours, especially when working on a file not created by you.
6. Finally, who can forget the live trace features? When a client sends you a pixelated tiny logo in JPG and wants to print a billboard ad, you know you have the ability to try salvage using live trace. This is missing in AD.
7. Optical kerning. When a client sends you a crappy font, you don’t have to kern letter pairs yourself, manually.

As you can see, many small features are missing in AD that have been available to AI users for many years. Adobe had the advantage of being many years ahead, taking the feedback of professional designers and creating a solution. However, at this stage of its development, it’s hard to recommend you ditch your current software and pick up AD. I am, however, hopeful that it will one day surpass Adobe, which has been quite predatory in terms of pricing.

Winner: AI

3. Learning Resources

Okay, so you’re just starting out in the industry as a designer. Quick question: Do people these days even attend courses to learn an app? I believe I speak for many when I say we use online resources to learn what we have to use, sort of a just-in-time learning. Be it YouTube or articles, learning is just a quick Google away. That said, you’ll find a ton more resources on AI than AD, just due to how long it’s been around. Take note that what you learn for an app does not directly map over to the other, although it's fundamentally the same action.

Winner: AI

4. Interoperability

In terms of interoperability, I mainly focus on saving and exporting files. AD supports almost all popular industry formats, while AI supports almost every format, including legacy ones. This is quite important for some people as they may have to export icons into DXF, WMF, or EMF, just to name a few. If you’re designing for print or the web, then AD has everything you need.

Winner: Tie (Slight edge to AI)

5. Stability

Affinity Designer is a relatively new software, and you might have guessed it — it’s fairly stable. It still crashes after long use with multiple large files open (I’ve experienced 3 so far), but comparing both apps at this stage, AD is doing a much better job than AI. Back in the day, most people would have their fingers on Ctrl+S or Cmd+S for the fear of losing hours of work when the error dialog/spinning rainbow comes on (you know that feeling!).

Both on Mac and PC versions, AI has proven to be more stable today (I tested both apps on Mac and Windows).

Winner: AI

6. Smoothness and Limits

Contradictory as it may seem, AD is the smoothest full-featured designing app I’ve ever used! Especially with the MacBook’s trackpad, it literally flies. I believe it was built to fully maximise the graphic capabilities of every computer in terms of GPU acceleration. On top of that, it supports a zoom percentage of 1,000,000%! Yes, that’s 6 zeroes, a whopping 1 million percent for a 10,000x zoom. This really, really helps you perfect those tiny elements in your design. Did I also mention that it has an unlimited artboard space? Gone are the days of getting stuck with 10 pull-up/roll-up banners in one single AI file.

AI, on the other hand, only supports 64,000% zoom, for a 640x document zoom. It is also choppy when zooming or scrolling at times, coupled with limited artboard space mentioned above.

Winner: AD

In Conclusion…

Adobe Illustrator might have taken the crown, but I'll always look forward to innovative features in Affinity Designer. Perhaps I’ve always rooted for the underdog (or maybe I just like shiny new features)!

Whether you’re a new designer or an industry veteran, I’m confident there are some scenarios where Affinity Designer is going to outperform Illustrator, be it undoing 8,000 history steps or the non-destructive vector editing. Who knows? You may just move to the Affinity suite of products one day. Did I mention they have an InDesign and Photoshop alternative as well? ◇

TL;DR Chart