Design and Productivity Apps

It was great to see Bryan show­case his use of Affin­i­ty Design­er for cre­at­ing high fideli­ty mock­ups. A show­case that brought on a deep­er dis­cus­sion about design­ing in the brows­er and Nathaniel doing a demo of a frame­work they’ve been devel­op­ing at his agency for pro­to­typ­ing with reusable com­po­nents. Their frame­work —not yet open source— is based on Frac­tal by Clear­left and there is an offi­cial blog post you can read to learn more about it.

As a reha­bil­i­tat­ed Adobe Illus­tra­tor user who has become pro­duc­tive with Sketch, I was inter­est­ed to see if Affin­i­ty Design­er had any fea­tures or work­flows that would make me want to jump ship. I came out of the meet­ing feel­ing like I real­ly need­ed to give it anoth­er try.

Here is why Affin­i­ty Design­er seems like a great Sketch alternative:

• Unlim­it­ed undo 😱
• Win­dows and Mac
• No sub­scrip­tion mod­el ricing 💰
• Incred­i­ble zoom capabilities
• Can open .ai and .psd files
• Uni­fied file format

This list is not exhaus­tive and it’s not meant to offend Sketch users (like myself), it’s just what I took away from our discussion.

One great thing about Sketch that I didn’t know, is that is has a real­ly nice Sketch Gulp Plu­g­in that you can use in your build process. I thought this was real­ly cool and I’m won­der­ing if there is an equiv­a­lent for Affin­i­ty Designer.

We also touched light­ly on fre­lanc­ing but we’ll get much deep­er on that sub­ject on the next hangout.