Affinity Designer Finally Arrives to the iPad

After teasing the iOS community for almost a year, Serif has released the iPad version of its often-praised professional level vector graphic software Affinity Designer. It has been quite a long wait since the iPad release of Serif’s other popular desktop app Affinity Photo, bringing desktop quality experience to Apple’s tablet. Just like its Photoshop-like sibling, Designer has all the features of a desktop vector art tool with the addition of being able to draw directly on the screen with great precision using the Apple Pencil.

Although we at digitalEPIGRAPHY are almost exclusively Photoshop users, we appreciated having Affinity Photo on our iPad  and being able to use the excellent Apple Pencil for our photo modification needs. However, those colleagues who prefer vector-based drawings versus Photoshop’s bitmap environment will certainly welcome the plethora of features Affinity Designer for iPad offers on the go. Serif has worked closely with leading artists, designers and illustrators to make sure that their software is the right combination of ease of use, features, and power to fulfil even the wildest demands of their target user base.
We will give you a full review at some point in the near future, once we spent some time with Designer in the field but let us give you a quick first impression of its feature set here.

“Velvet-smooth” vector tools; according to Serif’s website, Affinity Designer for iPad offers vector tools that allow one to create with “pinpoint precision”. This means that the iPad artist can do pretty much everything on the go as he/she would be able to do so in the Mac version. One can draw and manipulate nodes and Bezier handles, divide and combine shapes using – non-destructive – Booleans etc. The software has more than 100 brushes for traditional artists, they can customize the dynamics of a sizable range of paint brushes, pencils, ink pens, pastels and gouaches to their will while using such important tools as stroke stabilization while working on field documentation. Basically, anything that can be done with pixels in apps such as Procreate, is possible to be done so here using vector art.

What is even better, with Affinity Designer for iPad, one can seamlessly switch between vector and raster, allowing the artist to sketch, paint, and make pixel selections without ever needing to leave the app. Of course, the app supports all major color and layer controls and allows one to create artworks with thousands (!) of layers. Let us enumerate a few more features that grabbed our attention while scanning through the app’s iTunes page:

• Metal-accelerated to achieve blazing-fast performance.
• Sensitive to pressure, tilt and angle, Affinity Designer harnesses the full power and precision of Apple Pencil.
• Full iCloud drive integration allows for seamless file management, storage, and sharing.
• Panning and zooming is always live at 120fps.
• Live gradients, transforms, effects, and adjustments.
• Live pixel and retina view of vector artwork, wireframe view, split screen mode.
• Seamless switching between tools and editing modes for frustration-free design.
• Live effects, blend modes, image adjustments, and raster and vector masks for any part of your design.
• Use the strengths of vector and raster behaviors for the best of both worlds.
• The best pen tool, pencil tool, corner tool, curve editing, geometry operations, and smart shape tools available.
• High quality raster tools for texturing, masking and finishing artwork.
• Create your own brushes too.
• Artboards, symbols, constraints and stored assets give the ultimate flexibility for UI and graphic design.

The list of features goes on...

If you want to learn more about Affinity Designer for iPad in action, its feature list and design benefits, digitalEPIGRAPHY recommends checking out Serif’s dedicated website. Affinity Designer for iPad is available now from the App Store. You can purchase your copy today to get a time-limited 30 per cent discount on the iPad app for only US$13.99, €14.99 or £13.99.

If you want to see Affinity Designer in action before our review appears, you can do so by clicking on the following link. Another excellent walkthrough video with tips and tricks to get started with the software can be found here.