Want a powerful vector tool for your iPad? Look no further than the Affinity Designer app
All the creative power of a desktop vector drawing tool, but for just a fraction of the price
“For anyone starting out or, potentially, professionals fed up with having to pay the Adobe dollar, it’s well worth exploring”
SCORE PRICE £17 (£20 inc VAT) from Apple Store
Tablets, they used to say, aren’t appropriate for creative professionals. The software just isn’t there and, when it is, it can’t match what’s available for Windows and macOS. That’s something Serif wants to change. Over the past five years, it’s taken a different approach to mobile app development, tearing down its venerable PhotoPlus and DrawPlus applications and rebuilding them from the ground up with crossplatform, tablet-friendly code.
The result is a pair of iPad apps that replicate, feature-for-feature, their desktop counterparts. Affinity Designer is the most recent launch on the iPad, but it’s arguably even more impressive than Affinity Photo: this is a powerful piece of creative software.
So what can it do? It’s a vector drawing application, principally used to create graphics, signage, user interface widgets, game sprites and infographics. It’s different from a photo-editing application in that the visuals it creates can be resized with no loss in quality. Affinity Designer’s counterpart is Adobe Illustrator and, although it can’t match its esteemed rival for features, it’s much cheaper.
It’s the price of £20 that’s the key attraction here. That’s less than half the cost of the Windows and macOS versions and a fraction of the price of an Adobe CC Illustrator subscription.
If you’re looking to learn vector graphics design, Affinity Designer for iPad is a great place to start. And that’s the way I’ve approached this review. I’m no Picasso so I picked a fairly simple task – recreating a classic Tag Heuer Monaco watch face.
First, let me say that I’ve only scratched the surface of what Affinity Designer is capable of. I haven’t delved deep into the pixelbased tools, which allow you to add texture and apply Photoshop-style bitmap editing to your drawing. However, the drawings I have been able to create showcase Designer’s strengths and weaknesses.
All the core features you’d expect of a vector drawing tool are here. You can create and manipulate shapes, or use the pen tool to create Bézier curve lines. Pen and brush tools offer freehand vector shape creation and there’s a multitude of effects and adjustments.
If that sounds tricky, fear not. It’s easy to get up to speed by experimenting, and if you get stuck then there are many online resources. The big advantage in having a cross-platform app is that the knowledge base for the desktop and mobile apps is the same.
Likewise, Affinity Designer is able to work with and export to the same range of file types as its desktop counterpart, so you can work on a file on your main machine then transfer it and continue your work on your iPad when you’re out. You can open and work on all the files you’d expect to be able to use on a professional desktop drawing app, including EPS, PSD and Adobe Illustrator files. There’s also a seamless interchange with Affinity Photo, for those who have made the jump from Adobe’s software.
There are some lovely user interface touches, too. If you’re using an Apple Pencil you can hold either one or two fingers to the screen to use as a modifier – just like holding down Alt or Ctrl when using a keyboard.
In some areas, though, the app’s usability needs work. For instance, it took me a while to figure out how to select and export individual elements of a project, when that’s a job that should intuitive. I also found it far too easy to knock elements out of position, when all I wanted to do was zoom out or move to another area of my drawing. Finally, note that it isn’t compatible with all iPads – and even on a new iPad Pro, working with big, complicated files was sluggish.
If this is the price to have such a powerful creative tool on the iPad, however, I’m sold – and I’m sure plenty of creative types will be, too. For anyone starting out or, potentially, seasoned professionals fed up with having to pay the Adobe dollar, it’s well worth exploring.
There is, quite simply, nothing out there that can compete with the power of Affinity Designer on the iPad. It provides true desktop power for a fraction of the price of Adobe Illustrator.