This review should not be seen as a one-way conversation. We encourage you to follow this 5-part series and to join the discussion in the comments. The makers of each affinity designer vs illustrator 2016 free download these applications are listening, and our original review affinity designer vs illustrator 2016 free download a lot of debate, some heated criticism some deserved and some notaffinity designer vs illustrator 2016 free download some very positive responses and direct engagement with users from Serif Labs, who makes Affinity Designer, and Adobe.
Now is the time to have your say, directly to the makers of each software product. After our original review, we were contacted by the Adobe Illustrator team and asked to collect feature suggestions and criticisms from several icon designers. The main changes that icon designers wanted to see to Adobe Illustrator were the ability to export in multiple sizes and formats at the same time, similar to the same feature in Sketch.
Another major change that was requested was the removal of the arbitrary artboard limit. And finally, icon designers requested improvements to the Align to Pixel Grid feature. The major updates to Affinity Designer over the past 2 years have focused on improved performance, Export Personas, and some really great features such as Continuous Export and automatic export in 3X size. Bohemian Coding has also introduced numerous improvements since our last review. Among the most notable for icon designers are enhancements to performance and rendering.
A common issue encountered by icon designers using Sketch are related to SVG exports. In our review of Sketch later in this series we will take an in-depth look at the more than 10 improvements reported by Bohemian Coding to the SVG exports in versions 3. As any software developer or UX designer knows, software use is not a hard science. What one user considers easy, another user might find somewhat more difficult. Every user of any software brings with them their own experiences, paradigms, and assumptions, which influence how they interact with the software.
However, in order to make the review as objective and unbiased as possible, we have outlined the following parameters for the reviews:. The purpose of this review is to provide useful information to our site users, who are primarily graphic designers and app developers, and our designers who sell icons on our marketplace. The scope of affinity designer vs illustrator 2016 free download review is limited to a specific use case: icon design.
All three of the applications being evaluated are far too complex and have far too many features to do a full point-by-point comparison. In order to do a comparison that is useful, we must limit our scope to something that is manageable in the space we have. The scope of our comparison will be limited to the design process, workflow, and export preparation of the typical icon designer.
Even the phrase, the typical icon designer, is somewhat ambiguous, but we have chosen review criteria that most designers are likely to use when authoring the kinds of icons that are popular at the time of this writing: Glyph solid icons, line icons, color-filled line icons, and flat icons as depicted from left-to-right in the image below.
We have identified the following criteria for a meaningful comparison. There is no doubt that some readers will affinity designer vs illustrator 2016 free download that we have omitted some criteria, even self-evident criteria.
But it should be noted that the purpose is not to be exhaustive, only to cover enough of the criteria to be useful. As with any purchasing decision, the user should take responsibility for their own needs, download and evaluate the respective products, and draw their own conclusions. This article is only to help you get started, not to do the work for affinity designer vs illustrator 2016 free download. The first review, Adobe Illustrator, will be published on Wednesday August 17, Subsequent reviews will be posted each following Wednesday.
As always, feel free to make suggestions, criticisms, or any other feedback in the comments below. See Also:. A blog about icons, design, development, user experience…. Medium is an open platform where million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking.
Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more. If you have a story to tell, knowledge to share, or a perspective to offer — welcome home. Start a blog. Sign in. Two years after our in-depth comparison of Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer, and Sketchit appears that Adobe has taken notice of its two major challengers and has affinity designer vs illustrator 2016 free download some key features previously only seen in Sketch and Affinity Designer.
Scott Lewis atomiclotus Follow. The Iconfinder Blog A blog about icons, design, development, user experience…. Full-stack Developer, digital illustrator, and occasional writer. The Iconfinder Blog Follow. A blog about icons, design, development, user experience and business. Written by Scott Lewis atomiclotus Follow. More From Medium. The issue of diversity in icon design.
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