Subscription Averse! (Adobe VS Serif)

Even if you are not a designer, you have to admit monthly bills irks your last nerve… but paying for something you previously had unfettered access to can really send you over the edge!

If you ARE a graphic designer, you would know that Adobe was the only game in town for decades - the “industry standard” as they say. Long ago you would see a new version of the Adobe CS suite advertised; sell your kidney on the black market, court the local loan shark, open a lemonade stand and just have enough to buy the latest version…. but at least you owned it outright!

However in 2011 Adobe released CC (Creative Cloud) - mostly the same programs but you only have access to it via a subscription model. Even though regular CS versions of Adobe software would still work, as the years went by and newer operating systems did not support the old software, many were left with the subscription model CC as the only option.

Ad agencies that swim in money I assume could not be bothered …but if you are a freelancer with lower volume or just starting out, paying a heavy subscription is out of the question.

Thankfully in 2015, Serif released Affinity Photo a direct competitor to Adobe Photoshop and some time after came out with Affinity Designer and Publisher to go against “Illustrator” and “InDesign” respectively.

But the best part is the price; as a designer you may have different needs but the three things you always need to do are edit photos, create vector art and design longer documents like books. Thus Affinity covered those basics first and I’m sure have plans to expand to other niche applications.

Thankfully, Affinity Designer, Photo and Publisher are $50USD each to own (yes I said “own”) …and you’re likely to get discounts at certain times of the year as well.

There are still one or 2 functions that the Affinity programs may not have that Illustrator has… but the reverse is also true. For instance as of this writing Affinity Designer does not have an image trace feature like Adobe Illustrator and we know how much time that can save. However, Affinity apps have infinite zoom where Adobe does not have which is a pain when you need to be extra precise.

Later on, we’ll discuss more but as of now, if you are not willing to give up that kidney, Affinity software is a very good alternative to Adobe and even superior in some ways. As a designer I use both design suites for different tasks but it’s great that there is finally decent competition in the space - a win for designers and clients alike.