Last summer we wrote a blog post about why we switched from Adobe Illustrator to the Affinity Suite, which contains Affinity Design and Affinity Photo. We wrote this as we regularly recommend Affinity to other website designers and website developers, our clients and agencies we work with. This blog post was picked up by Serif who developed Affinity, and they sponsored a blog post on Creative Bloq. We are excited to announce that now the article has also been published as an advertorial in Net magazine!

The piece repeats what we covered in our blog post, so we thought it would be helpful to summarise just a few of the points for choosing Affinity Suite below:

• Affinity Designer is a high-end graphics software application that is geared towards professional graphic and website designers
• The other development within Affinity Suite is Affinity Photo, and this is a genuine alternative to Photoshop
• The cost of Affinity Designer and Photo is a one off-fee of £48.99. This is another way in which Affinity is trying to set itself apart from Adobe, as Adobe offers subscription-based plans
• Affinity has been developed to support professional designers and developers and one way this is done is through a streamlined workflow, with customisable layer effects
• It is possible to create a design based on up to date preset screen dimensions e.g. you can choose to start creating your design for an iPad 2 or iPhone 6/7/8

While we wish that more clients would work in Affinity, it doesn’t matter that they don’t as Affinity supports PDF and AI files. We hope in time that more will switch over and perhaps as they can see from this coverage and the positive reaction we have had, there are clearly many other people who have either done it or are ready to make the move.

Outside of its direct users, Affinity has also received recognition within the industry: in 2015, Apple awarded it the highly coveted Design Award at the Worldwide Developers Conference.

As a website design and development agency, we are always looking out for how we can produce better designs and products. We are more than happy to share what we find, as we think that our industry is built around sharing best practice. This means we like to be given recommendations as well – get in touch if you know of a product or software you think we should be using.

Ultimately, we work for our clients and our aim is to help support and grow their businesses. The piece published includes shots of our designs for a few of our clients including Fellpack, a new restaurant in the Lake District, and Red Fox Brewery (new website coming soon!), which is a traditional brewery based in Essex. We are proud to be able to showcase what we produced for them and would highly recommend you check both out!