Affinity Designer
Feature-packed graphics editing
$19.99 From Serif, affinity.serif.com Made for iPad Air 2, iPad Pro, iPad (2017) or later Needs iOS 11.0 or later
Bringing desktop apps to mobile is hard. Most developers settle for a subset of features. But Affinity Photo for iPad broke that mould, delivering complete professional image manipulation. Now Serif is back with a full–blown vector drawing app.
Affinity Designer looks a lot like the Mac version with which it shares most of its code, yet feels totally at home on the touchscreen. We tested it on a 10.5–inch iPad Pro, and if Apple wanted to demonstrate the power of its Metal graphics engine running on the A10X processor with the ProMotion high refresh rate screen, it really couldn’t ask for more. Graphics apps often come set to low resolutions with simple demo files to flatter their speed. Affinity’s sample drawings stack thousands of elements, and you can scroll and zoom around them as fast as your fingers will move. Zoom is practically infinite, never maxing out when you’re trying to nail fine detail. Vector apps don’t get any more responsive than this.
Vector drawing is a specialist skill, and Affinity Designer doesn’t pretend otherwise. It can be a little daunting at first, and Serif’s video tutorials aren’t an ideal substitute for a
full written manual. But anyone familiar with the likes of Illustrator will soon feel at home — then astonished to find that not only is drawing with the Apple Pencil feasible, or even just your fingers, but no matter how deep you go, the features keep coming.
The key shortcuts you’d normally rely on are replaced by holding down a finger or two. All your objects are listed in a Layers panel, from where you can tweak their attributes and create masks. There are blending modes (with curves), non–destructive color adjustments and layer styles, and you can even switch to a Pixel ‘persona’ and paint raster effects inside vector shapes. Need even more? Roundtrip your work to Affinity Photo for iPad or, via iCloud, on the Mac. You can also easily switch between the Mac and iPad versions of Designer at will. Documents you’ve created will work with the upcoming release of Affinity Publisher, and color management is prepress–ready.
Web and UI designers may favor lightweight, focused apps like Sketch, but Affinity offers plenty to entice them. Besides smart shape editing, layer management, alignment, snapping, and typographic controls, there’s full support for exporting slices, and you even get a large set of ready– made iOS UI graphics. As for the artistically inclined, Designer’s fully customizable vector brushes may not have quite the instant play value of some painting apps, and the way strokes update as you draw takes some getting used to, but their superb flexibility soon becomes evident — as you can see in the sample pieces, some by artists who hadn’t previously worked in vector. This is more than an app, it’s an inspiration.
the bottom line. Affinity Designer isn’t just a proper vector app, it’s an incredibly complete, mature, and responsive one. Bravo!