The current intro price for Affinity Designer (39.99) is a steal and you also get some nice brush libraries and templates with it. The vector brushes are stunning too for freehand stuff. I found it much faster with larger documents than Illustrator, and it has a lot of nifty and clever things. My main goal was getting pure curves over to Affinity, no complex layouts.īut yeah, I can highly recomment Affinity Designer and the Affinity Photo Beta for Windows which is free ATM. My tests were with an earlier Beta and some things may have changed in the meantime.

EMF worked best for my relatively simple purposes in the end and it was relatively small.

PDF works, but since Rhino doesn’t do it natively, results depend on the PDF printer you install (I tried Bullzip).AI export from Rhino can’t be read in Affinity Designer, since Rhino is using the ages old EPS based format (which was used by Illustrator until version 8 IIRC) while Affinity expects the PDF based newer format.Even though I couldn’t export in AI format, I was still able to continue working on existing Adobe Illustrator files when using the app, then export the changes in EPS or SVG format.I tried this during the beta and this is what I found:

I was also pleasantly surprised at the app's ability to import AI files. This means page dimensions, object readouts (on creation/resizing/moving), measurements, guides, grids and rulers will all display 'real world' scaled values by default. The list includes everything from EPS files and Print Ready PDFs, to PNGs and JPGs, plus the capability to export individual layers and slices. Affinity Designer lets you set a drawing scale on any new document or open unscaled document the drawing scale of imported CAD-based DWG/DXF documents is also honored. Advanced import and export capabiltiesĪnother highlight was the extensive range of export options on offer, which Serif claims are the most advanced you can have for an iPad app. Selecting type was a little fiddly with the touch screen controls, which sometimes misses off the first and last letters, but this was only a minor annoyance and probably the only time I felt that a keyboard would make things easier. For more custom lettering work, you can convert fonts to outlines or add guidelines to create lettering from scratch. You can import your own fonts, add text to paths and fine-tune the kerning and tracking. The app comes complete with a good range of typography options to fully customise your letteringĪffinity Designer for iPad comes with a good range of typography options.

Affinity designer drawing