Affinity Designer vs Illustrator: When and Why to Use Each Tool?

Affinity Designer vs Illustrator are graphic design tools that are two hot choices for debate for professional designers. When it comes to creating professional and beautiful vector designs Affinity Designer and Adobe Illustrator are the two reliable alternatives. This Affinity Designer vs Illustrator comparison guide will give you complete information about how compelling and impressive these tools are.

Affinity Designer vs Illustrator: What are they ?

I am sure by the end of this guide you will be able to make your choice between Affinity Designer vs Adobe Illustrator web design software. Let’s begin the comparison and learn the differences and similarities if they have any. When you want to create a website make sure you choose the best things.

What is Affinity Designer?

Affinity Designer is a robust vector graphic design program to cater to all your professional design needs. Various designers, creatives, artists use this tool to create their own innovative piece. It was developed by UK-based Serif labs. Affinity Designer is an ideal solution to create UI designs, web graphics, icons, vector illustrations, mock-ups, typography, logos, and more.

Furthermore, Affinity Designer comes with an asset management feature that eases the process of organizing your projects. It is compatible with Windows, macOS, and iOS. This software has a plethora of features along with an impressive zoom of over 1,000,000% for smooth and quick effects without losing the image quality.

What is Adobe Illustrator?

Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphic software developed and distributed by Adobe. It was originally built for Apple Macintosh. And the recent release of Illustrator CC 2020 was released in October 2019. You can easily run this software on both Windows as well as macOS platforms. It comes with a great set of drawing tools.

It can be effortlessly used in several areas of printing, advertising, illustrations, logo design, photography, graphs, charts, web design, and more. Adobe Illustrator has an amazingly simple interface with superb features and functionality.

When to Use Affinity Designer?

Many professional designers use this vector graphic design software because of the fact that it combines Illustrator and Photoshop into one single program. It comes with plenty of features and various useful shortcuts to help you get started quickly.

• You can use shape and pen tools to create vector pixel designs.
• When you want to create professional logos for your business.
• When you want natural and responsive brushes for painting.
• It is 300 % faster than Adobe Illustrator.
• If you want to make use of both raster and vector graphic tools under one place.
• You may consider Illustrator vs Photoshop for better understanding.
• When you want to include various impressive effects in your project.

When to Use Illustrator?

Adobe Illustrator is a versatile vector-based graphic design software to help you create graphic designs, logos, and many other basic to complex creative designs for your business. You can easily create and scale them as and when required. Even if you want to create anything small or large scale design elements.

• It lets you create multi-page documents such as brochures, banners, annual reports.
• You can easily create innovative and unique web designs using Adobe Illustrator.
• When you wish to create professional vector designs for your business.
• It gives pixel-perfect results effortlessly.
• When you need to craft complex design and you need to alter it, resize things repeatedly.
• When you need to design images with creative text.
• If you wish to work on pixel photographs.
• If you are working on print documents and multiple documents at a time.

Key Features of Affinity Designer

Affinity Designer is a powerful tool that enables you to create and edit web design. It allows users to create designs with precision. While using the on-screen dynamic feature you can quickly create graphics and designs with ease. However, below are some of its top features.

• It’s blazing fast.
• Never underestimate the zoom power. It provides you pan and zoom at 60fps
• It provides you real-time gradients, blend mode, and various effects.
• You can switch between light to dark modes.
• It comes with great file compatibility such as HDR, EXR, PNG, JPEG, PDF, SVG, TIFF, EPS, GIF format.
• Affinity Designer comprises both vector and pixel tools in one single tool.
• This software is available for both macOS and Windows.
• It constantly provides important updates and improvements.
• You can add scalable text for impressive headlines and other graphic design projects.
• It comes with live OpenType feature previews.
• You can use different color palettes as per your project needs.
• It automatically scales your content once you resize the document.
• Affinity Designer has 16-bit per channel support.
• You can enjoy various live effects such as
  • Inner shadow
  • Outer shadow
  • Inner glow
  • Outline
  • Gaussian blur
  • Color overlay
  • Gradient overlay and many more
• You can get access to many blend modes
  • Reflect
  • Glow
  • Subtract
  • Hue
  • Hard light
  • Vivid light
  • Normal
  • Multiply and many more
• It lets you manage stroke stabilization for smooth effects.
• Seamlessly resize documents with or without resizing the artwork.

Key Features of Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator contains vibrant advancements. Anybody from professionals to novices can use Adobe Illustrator without a hitch. The latest version of Illustrator contains amazing features and enhanced tools for greater productivity. You can easily use this software to create small to larger designs. And below are some of the top features of Adobe Illustrator.

• Adobe Illustrator enables you to make use of real-time editing and drawing.
• You can scale the objects and all the scaling effects will not be shown as outlines.
• You can easily drag & drop artboards between two open documents.
• The cut, copy, and paste features can be applied via keyboard shortcuts.
• The facility to use the drag & drop tools between the toolbar and the drawer.
• A newly added auto-spell-check feature helps you to create the correct brochure, resume, posters, and other artworks.
• All the files are saved and exported in the background.
• Various newly improved effects such as blur, drop shadow, inner & outer glow will give you amazing results.
• Adobe Illustrator enables you a faster rendering of feather effects, gaussian effects in preview mode.
• You can easily create color blends to create innovative web design with ease.
• It comes with color synchronization and file packaging.
• Various built-in templates are there to choose from.

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Affinity Designer vs Illustrator Comparison Table (2020)

Advantages of Affinity Designer

• Affinity Designer lets you create artboards of any size with a lot of details.
• It’s a great collaboration of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.
• It perfectly works with both Mac and Windows.
• You can easily create professional illustrations, vector designs, and many other projects that need a zooming feature.
• It’s an ideal choice to make isometric video game graphics.
• You can have correctly aligned and measured designs with Affinity Designer.
• It lets you create precise objects with ease.
• You can easily create both pixel and vector graphics with Affinity Designer.
• A wide selection of colors helps you craft beautiful designs.
• The advanced creative tools can help you handle complex jobs with ease.
• It also includes vector creation tools and image editing tools.
• You can flawlessly create dynamic symbols and responsive items with Affinity Designer.

Disadvantages of Affinity Designer

• Affinity Designer does not have any free trial for iPad.
• It doesn’t offer any plugin capability. Thus, it can not be tailored to specific purposes.
• Some users may find it difficult while selecting objects and layering.
• It treats all objects as filled.
• It has a steep learning curve.
• At times it gets complicated to use it, especially for beginners.

Advantages of Illustrator

• Adobe Illustrator has a user-friendly interface.
• The in-panel editing feature of Illustrator makes the designing process smooth.
• It is also one of the best logo design software out there.
• Adobe Illustrator is highly scalable.
• It perfectly integrates with other Adobe products.
• There are various options for sizes such as pixel, point, and inches.
• It is a highly flexible tool.
• Anybody related to print marketing can benefit from this software.
• You can smoothly scale your vector files without losing any detail.
• It is one of the lightweight vector design software.
• If you want to try your hands on type combo then, nothing can beat Adobe Illustrator.
• While creating any two-dimensional design, you can thoroughly enjoy the incredible precision.
• It comes with a wide range of tools to use.
• You can head to tutorials and how-to guides for a quick understanding of the flow.
• Creating animations with Adobe Illustrator is a breeze.
• It lets you change or alter existing images seamlessly.

Disadvantages of Illustrator

• Adobe Illustrator has a steep learning curve.
• The limited support for raster graphics.
• It requires an enormous amount of patience to work with Illustrator.
• Getting started with Adobe Illustrator can be a little challenging for beginners.
• Some users may find the interface a little clunky.
• The snap-to feature needs improvements.
• It lacks the backward compatibility of files.

Affinity Designer vs Illustrator – Which is Better For You?

Certainly, there is no doubt that both Affinity Designer and Adobe Illustrator are powerful choices for creating vector graphic designs. But Adobe Illustrator is taking the first place. However, even the Affinity Designer also has an array of features to offer you. The fact that Affinity Designer is a little cheaper than Adobe Illustrator.

It is suitable for beginners to create their first easy and beautiful designs. But this by no means confirms that you should not use Adobe Illustrator for your projects. However, Affinity designer vs Illustrator which platform can serve your business needs better boil downs to your requirements. So, it totally is a personal pick and that may vary with your project’s objective. And don’t forget to share with me in the comments below.

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