Serif Affinity Designer

About Serif Affinity Designer

Affinity Designer is a vector application that keeps a raster engine in the same document. Switching between the two modes is a single click, and the raster work lands on the same layer stack as the vector work, which means texture, grain and painted shading can go straight onto an illustration without exporting it into a separate editor and losing the paths.

The drawing tools are precise where they need to be. The pen and node tools give exact control, live corners round a shape after it is drawn, the shape builder combines and subtracts overlapping geometry by dragging, and boolean operations stay editable rather than destroying the source paths. Snapping is configurable to the point that it stops being a nuisance.

Performance is the practical selling point. Documents with very large numbers of objects pan and zoom without stalling, the zoom range is deep enough for detail work at any scale, and the whole interface stays responsive during operations that make other applications think for a moment. There is no subscription check running behind any of it.

Output covers both screen and print work. Artboards hold a whole icon set or an interface layout in one document, the export panel writes multiple assets at several scales in one pass, and the print side handles process and spot colour, bleed and end to end colour management. Files pass to the companion photo and publishing applications without an export step.

What is included in this build

• Vector and raster work in one document with a single click between modes
• Pen, node and shape builder tools with live, editable boolean operations
• Live corners, live shapes and non-destructive effects on any layer
• Multiple artboards with independent sizes in a single document
• Export panel producing multiple assets at several scales in one pass
• Process and spot colour with full colour management for print
• Perpetual licensing with no subscription entitlement checks
• Deep zoom range with smooth panning on very large documents

Changed in version 2.6.5.3782

• Faster rendering on documents with tens of thousands of objects
• Improved handling of imported files from other vector applications
• Additional export presets in the assets panel
• Better pressure response with graphics tablets
• Reduced memory use on documents with many raster layers

Installation walkthrough

These steps assume a clean machine. If a previous release of the same application is present, deal with that first, since an overlapping install is the most common cause of a setup that stops halfway.

1. Disable real-time protection until the install completes.
2. Extract the archive to a short path with no spaces.
3. Close any other Affinity application before starting setup.
4. Run the installer as administrator and choose the interface language.
5. Reboot once so file previews and the shell integration register.

System requirements and file details

Frequently asked about this title