Affinity Designer 1.7 Review
- In this class you will learn about the new features and improvements for the Pen Tool in Affinity Designer from version 1.7 and prevalent in 1.9. This is an add-on class to the previous 'Learn to Use the en Tool in Affinity Designer' where you will learn how the new pen and node tool features will make it even easier than it was drawing anything. The ideal student should have some familiarity with the Pen Tool in Affinity Designer.
- Affinity Designer is the fastest, smoothest, most precise vector graphic design software available. Whether you’re working on branding, concept art, print projects, icons, UI, UX, or web mock ups, Affinity Designer will revolutionise how you work, on macOS and Windows.
Download version 1.7.3 Download version 1.7.2 Download version 1.7.1 Download version 1.7.0. Download the latest and previous versions of Affinity Designer (Windows) Skip to main content Photo Designer Publisher Store Learn Face icon used to represent user profile. Resource: Sketchy brushes Designer 1.7 for Affinity products. A set of vector brushes suitable for line art thick to thin, rough edged, and more.
Header image by the wonderful Zutto.
In 2016, I was in the last stages of negotiating my exit from a protracted corporate drama in Malta when I saw this video. I wanted to punch the screen. Just as I was wrapping up and walking away from constantly churning out complex, tabled UI´s I saw that the Constraints feature would save me a world of heartache.
It had been an odd few years for me creatively…my comics just seemed to get me into trouble and I didn´t enjoy illustrating anymore.
I grew restless here in Spain and I needed something different. A stint as a consultant over in Sweden led me to move to Malta where I served as Creative Director then CMO, which further removed me from making anything fun. I was having a ball though.
The author bollixed drunk in the Malta office on a workday.
A hangover and InDesign were my daily companions as I pieced together investment pitches bristling with optimistic graphs. The craziest thing is that although I was an early Affinity Designer customer, I never used it. I was initially stumped by trying to get varying weights on strokes and just walked away from it.
It sat there installed and unused for well over a year until that 1.5 video made me give it another go.
And…BLAMMO!
Discovering Affinity Designer coincided a whole new chapter for me as I moved back to Spain and started to make things just for fun again. I was reinvigorated and found myself enjoying design. I rarely used vectors before but now I was Mr. Bezier.
And after a year or so of personal projects, I began to receive a trickle and then a steady flow of offers which lead me to reopen the doors here at Clamnuts. I am back in business in many senses thanks to these apps.
So here we are in 2019 with the dual release of Affinity Designer & Photo 1.7 for the desktop and iPad versions and the imminent release of Affinity Publisher.
Isometric Tools
Similar to the Constraints announcement back in 2016…I wish had the new Isometric Studio while working on a few game projects last year. But I used it a lot during the 1.7 Beta period to create this animated sequence.
Performance Increases
Yep. I definitely can feel a new snappiness on my relatively new iMac but I have yet to really explore these boosts.
Alternate Futures
This is a new feature which I think will become a fav as currently, I split designs into “what ifs” just by duplicating artboards and files. I need to fiddle with this one more.
Appearance Studio
This is exactly what I needed. I have been gradually working on my own Asset and Brush pack called The Shiznizzle but then decided to pause work on it when Matt the Project Manager teased a look at the new Appearance Studio. It is brilliant and will lead to a whole new leap in production speed for me. Here is a rather phallic example of me using Appearances to rejig a second fill on to one of the Shiznizzle image fills.
Effects Studio now has checkboxes
Now you can uncheck and recheck Effects on and off. This is one of those small improvements which will make things so much easier for lots of hardcore users like me.
Symmetry on Pixel Brushes
Definitely a step in the right direction to break our dependency on Procreate for sketching. The iPad versions of the Affinity apps are not scaled down or lighter versions of the desktop apps: they have somehow fit all of the features into them. But this complexity and some other issues do not make them ideal for making quick sketches or illustration pieces.
Procreate is still the king for this but I think Affinity could seriously challenge them over the next years. I would love to see a Sketch Persona which combines some of the best parts of Procreate and Clip Studio´s usability with a scaled down UI and the defaults set for artists and not programmers.
PSD import / export improvements
I have yet to see the full effect of these improvements but I´m sure over the next few weeks I will. Exporting Affinity Designer for After Effects for example has always been messy and it always requires a pitstop in Photoshop to fiddle so maybe we can now skip that downer.
There are loads more tweaks and improvements not mentioned here, see the full lists here.
What’s not changed?
At the time of writing, Affinity Publisher has not been released publicly but apparently, you will be able to switch seamlessly between the three apps. I’m praying that this will fix one fall down area which keeps me having to use Photoshop and Illustrator for creating my Artboards and fixing bad outputs.
The Affinity apps are of course amazing for illustration and design work but still not 100% ideal for production. By production, I mean being able to constantly output ready assets. I churn out crazy amounts of graphics each week for clients and our own projects.
There is a consistent issue in Affinity Designer which causes me consistent gloom… If you create new Artboards (and position them at whole numbers as recommended) you will find a 1px discrepancy on your many of your outputs or slices. App Store assets and advertising collateral, for example, will be rejected because of this.
On this massive project, I had to manually tweak 200 artboard/slices after a 1px discrepancy crept in somehow.
I loathe having to use Photoshop and Illustrator daily to pick up the slack but I think Publisher and the forthcoming Lightroom alternative from Serif will eventually fix this.
After recommending the Affinity apps to many design pros, many come back to me with gripes along the lines of “…brilliant apps but they are not quite Adobe killers just yet”. A fair point but it is important to remember that we are still only on version 1.7.
It is easy to forget that.
Affinity Publisher is being released on 19th June
This will push Serif into a whole new realm. The world is desperate for an app like this and the barrier to entry for newbies is so much lower compared to Affinity Designer and Photo. You can learn it all in a day and start making things in no time.
Even though Publisher is currently still in Beta I have completed several big print jobs in it.
I have a long list of print products which I shelved because of my repulsion of InDesign but now nothing is stopping me. I knocked out and published a full book within a week of downloading the Affinity Publisher Beta. The image above is from one of the new products we are developing which involved laying out 200 unique card faces. Done!
On the 19th of June in Serif HQ there will another Affinity Live Event and I´m sure besides launching Publisher, there will be some surprise announcements.
Get Affinity Designer 1.7 now at a reduced price during the launch phase.
Cheers,
Bob @clamnuts
Affinity Designer and Photo have received their biggest ever updates, adding market-leading performance improvements, best-ever usability and an extensive list of new features.
The new 1.7 versions of both Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer are available now with a 20% discount ($39.99 desktop, $15.99 iPad) with no subscription. Existing users can download the updated versions free.
Affinity Press Release
Biggest-ever Affinity updates bring unrivalled speed, power and extensive new features
GPU compute acceleration, HDR monitor support and a new memory management system ensure the Affinity suite continues to be at the cutting edge of modern creative software.
Affinity Designer and Photo today receive their biggest ever updates, adding market-leading performance improvements, best-ever usability and an extensive list of new features.
The latest versions underline Serif’s commitment to pushing the limits of performance that users can expect from their hardware. It’s the same approach that made Affinity apps the first fully-featured creative desktop apps to make the leap to iPad.
Affinity Designer 1.7 Full
Today’s v1.7 upgrades mean Mac users can now enjoy end-to-end Metal compute acceleration to take full advantage of the Mac’s discrete GPU, making all raster layer and brush operations up to 10 times faster than ever before. Additionally, the apps now support multiple GPUs—whether internal or with external units connected—multiplying the performance gains further.
Serif Managing Director Ashley Hewson says: “It’s really important that we are leading the way in exploiting the latest technologies available to us and our customers. GPU compute acceleration is something we have worked tirelessly on for the last couple of years as it is certainly the future in achieving phenomenal speeds, even when working on massive, deep-colour projects. We’re pleased to say that for Affinity customers on Mac the future is now here.”
Serif is working on hardware acceleration for its Windows version too, although that will be delivered in a future update. But that hasn’t stopped them achieving big performance increases—today’s updates introduce a rewritten memory management system resulting in 3x or 4x speed improvements across many tasks on Windows machines.
Dial and Pen support for Microsoft Surface devices has also been significantly upgraded, giving users new ways to interact with the apps.
And in a market-first for photo editing and graphic design apps, Affinity Photo and Designer now come with full support for the latest HDR / EDR monitors. This allows photographers to see new levels of the detail captured in RAW files, while designers can push colour intensity in graphics far further than was possible before.
“Using Affinity Photo with an HDR monitor offers a simply stunning experience,” says Ashley Hewson. “It’s amazing the detail and dynamic range the latest SLR cameras capture when shooting in RAW, and Affinity Photo now offers the opportunity to actually see all that depth while editing on an HDR monitor.
“But this isn’t just for high-end photography. As more and more graphic content is being consumed on HDR displays, it will start to become important that designers are using an app which can both work in a 32bit colour space and render the results on an HDR monitor. Affinity Designer is the first professional graphic design application to do both.”
Users of Affinity on iPad aren’t left out either. There are further performance optimisations and a refreshed, compact UI which both gives more real estate for working, but also to allow for the ultimate experience on the new 7.9-inch screen iPad mini.
“The new iPad mini is an incredible device, especially now it supports Apple Pencil,” says Ashley Hewson. “It’s pretty cool that you can work on high-end photo compositions or full design projects with thousands of objects on such a small device”
As well as these device specific improvements, there are plenty of new features and improvements which have been added—all of them available on the Mac, Windows and iPad versions from today.
Affinity Photo
· Much improved RAW processing engine offering significantly faster loading of files, a new demosaicing algorithm, more effective noise reduction, hot pixel removal and wide colour space development.
· Rewritten brush engine adding all-new multi-brushes, a symmetry mode (up to 32-way) and on-the-fly nozzle rotation with shortcut keys.
· Batch processing is improved, a new assets panel is available for quick drag and drop of commonly used elements, and the layers panel has had a complete overhaul.
Affinity Designer
· New isometric controls allowing you to work directly on any isometric plane - or fit existing elements to a plane with a single click.
· Vector shapes can now possess an unlimited number of strokes and fills, with complete freedom to interleave different attributes and control how they are blended together. Arrowheads have been added to the stroke panel too.
· Improvements to almost all vector tools, including lasso selection of modes, the pencil tool adding a sculpt mode, a new point transform tool as well as huge improvements to guides, grids and snapping.
“This update isn’t only about the big new features and performance gains—we’ve also made literally thousands of little tweaks and improvements to both apps based on all the feedback we get from our customers every day. It’s a lot of these little enhancements which add up to mean both Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer are more productive than ever before.”
The new 1.7 versions of both Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer are available now with a 20% discount ($39.99 desktop, $15.99 iPad) with no subscription. Existing users can download the updated versions free.
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