Every so often an App comes along that immediately earns a lot of love and instantly gathers a following. October of last year, one such App was launched. After 3.5 years in the making, Affinity Designer was finally released and designers are loving it.
We love to show our support for new promising products, especially those that challenge the status quo. In this case we’re talking about the dominance of Illustrator in the vector design space for almost 28 years(!). Corel Draw, Inkscape (free) or Sketch are worthy alternatives but neither really managed to reach the same level. Given the recent transition from Adobe to a cloud and subscription model for their Creative Suite, and the community outcries, it’s safe to say Affinity Designer came at a great time. Much like Adobe’s Photoshop has a fight in its hands against Pixelmator, Illustrator may actually start to receive some punches.
In this spirit and in partnership with the Affinity team we offered a copy to the lucky winner, Gonçalo Martins, of our Christmas giveaway. He’s been playing around with the app and here’s what he thinks thus far:
For years now I’ve been using other tools and lately I’ve been feeling the need to find a new one that simply works. Affinity Designer caught my eye since their beta version and to luckily my expectations were met, even though it’s still only version 1. Affinity Designer is a great app, robust, reliable and above all user-friendly, making the re-learning almost instantaneous, be it for web designers like me, grafic designers or illustrators. I highly recommend Affinity Desinger.
Origins
The company behind the app is UK based Serif. They’be been developing low-cost and award winning design software for Windows for more than 25 years when their Head of Development had an idea. He invisioned a new range of professional graphics software built from the ground up for Mac focused on the workflow of creative professionals. Although being only available on Mac can be seen as a disadvantage (and leave some people — me included — pouting), it was an important decision because of the professionals they wanted to attract and to fulfill some of the key criteria he determined:
- lightning speed
- no memory shortages (development started on an 80MB IPad)
- cover core creative disciplines of Photo Editing, Vector Drawing and Desktop Publishing
- use the exact same format between the 3 applications
- light UI — achieved through a “Persona” based UI system
- Productive workflow for creative pros
With a dedicated team of no more than 10 guys and 3 years later, the first build was ready. Initially used internally by their creatives, the team decided to launch a beta version soon afterwards, to get more real user feedback and build awareness around the app.
The overwhelmingly positive response
With a customer base of mainly Windows users, they had to build awareness from the ground up. Having set up Facebook and Twitter accounts, they went out searching for press. And press they found. When a site that averages 20M visits a month Creative Bloq anounces your App, you can bet the word will spread. Two renowned artists with a substantial following on Twitter shared the news and overnight it reached 1M Twitter users. They even reached top rank on Hacker News (no easy feat!). In the 2 months that the Beta was up and having spent only about £2000 (banner ads) on marketing, 30 000 people had tried it, coming mainly from Creative Bloq, Facebook, Twitter and Hacker News.
The week they launched it on Apple Store, it was the #1 paid app worldwide and received consistent 5-star reviews (over 400 of them!).
What’s to come
The main focus of the team right now is R&D, heavily based on users’ feedback. If something is obvious it’s that they do not want to lose touch from what digital creatives actually need. That’s probably a big factor behind their success since the beginning, and since they actually recognize they owe a lot of their success to the great feedback they received, they’ll do their best to give back to the community.
Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher (the other 2 applications planned for launch this year in their suite) are also about to see the light, firstly, as their older brother, in Beta versions. Once they do, the team think it will actually be a serious contender to the Adobe hegemony.
If you’re interested, you can keep up with Affinity development on their blog or grab a copy of their Affinity Review quarterly companion magazine (there are cool tutorials over there too).
We’d appreciate if you could let us know what you think of our first product review. We might spread ourselves thin by considering products not only in design but also in development, digital marketing, data science, and others, but we hope it’ll bring value to you guys. If you think it doesn’t make sense and you don’t find it useful, give us a shout please!
Cheers,
Zoran Vitez
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