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:
.ai
and .psd
filesThis 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.