The other caveat is one we know well from the Office story in commercial workflows, consistency of tools and file formats for interchange are important, and you might suggest that while one-man-band illustrators or small studios could make the switch easily, it’s much harder for full-scale agencies and publishers. Serif is fortunate that they put themselves in a position to start with a completely blank slate in creating this fully integrated suite, instead of, as with Adobe, having to deal with millions of lines of legacy code which, crucially, often originated in different companies and had to be made to feel and behave like a suite – and the effect is wonderful. If you’re familiar with Illustrator, there will be a slight learning curve in switching to Designer, but the app is generally so much of a delight to use that not only will you grasp it quickly but you’ll also wonder why Adobe didn’t do things like that years ago. Yes, there are likely edge cases where certain Illustrator features and workflows won’t be available or will be clunky in comparison, but it’s even more likely that Designer’s advantages – fast, consistent, modern and easier (for me at least) to use – will offset these for many, many people. Affinity Designer, the only one I’ve used, is not merely as powerful and flexible as Adobe Illustrator is but in many ways it’s more so. To the first: yes, with familiar caveats. First, are the apps actually good enough for people to consider them instead of Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, and second, what is the nature of the ‘challenge’? Hence this post which, uh, expands on the point. I said, within the 140 character constraint, that the apps in the Affinity suite are genuine challengers to Adobe’s market-dominating apps, and I worried for the rest of the morning about how that comment was interpreted. This morning I tweeted to congratulate Serif on the release of Affinity Photo, its new image-editing app which joins the vector app Affinity Designer (already out) and DTP app Affinity Publisher (out later this year).
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