Why we switched from Adobe to the Affinity Suite

Furthermore, Affinity has clearly been developed with the aim of supporting a streamlined workflow. Customisable layer effects allow designers to effortlessly refine elements of their design, and these adjustment layers can be saved as templates for future use. We also recommend using the asset management panel for easy access to design elements that feature recurringly in projects.

The team at WCD are sticklers for detail and accuracy, which is why we love Affinity’s advanced snapping and grid options. Affinity also features zooming capabilities of up to 1,000,000% (that’s right, one million percent!).

What’s more, we feel Affinity is far better suited to working with both vectors and bitmap images within the same document than its Adobe counterparts. This often required the work of both Illustrator and Photoshop under our previous Adobe spearheaded design processes.

Our seamless transition was aided by Affinity’s support for PSD and AI files – meaning that we were able to work using our existing source files with ease. Similarly, its wide range of file support facilitates our collaborations with external designers and agencies.

Affinity’s slick, accessible and highly intuitive user interface means users need little time to bring themselves up to speed with the nuanced differences between Affinity and Adobe. This also makes Affinity an attractive option for beginners as well as seasoned professionals; Illustrator and Photoshop are generally considered tricky for novices to get accustomed to. Though, in spite of this, their user interfaces haven’t changed a great deal over the years.

Affinity’s improbable success – in what has traditionally been a largely impenetrable market – hasn’t gone unnoticed, with Apple awarding Affinity with its highly coveted Design Award at Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June 2015.

Should this current rate of expansion be maintained, Affinity looks set to match and maybe even surpass the range of functions and features that helped establish Illustrator as the unrivalled platform for so many years.

With a free trial available, we’d strongly advise all designers to consider giving Affinity a chance. It’s been two years since we switched to using Affinity, and we haven’t looked back since.