I’ve been using it for more than half my life and I would really rather not say goodbye, and the new iPad app is promising, albeit limited. That said, I’m still paying $120 a year for Photoshop. Together, Serif’s three Affinity apps-Photo, Designer, and Publisher (which is sort of an InDesign analog)-are a tempting alternative to Adobe’s subscription-based apps, and their aggression in embracing iPad warms my heart. Friends who have been using Illustrator for years also swear by Affinity Designer.

I’m an Illustrator fraud, but I know enough to be dangerous-and I was able to figure out how to do all of the actions I need to do in Affinity Designer in minutes.

(The Mac version is $50.) I was just as impressed with Affinity Designer. I’d already been impressed with Serif’s releases on the iPad, where Affinity Photo offers many of the features of Adobe Photoshop for $20. Rather than paying Adobe $240 a year for an app to open logo files a handful of times, I spent $50 and bought Serif’s Affinity Designer. I installed it in a virtual machine using VMWare Fusion and tried to run it, but it didn’t want to open my files and I decided that I was tired of fighting it. With the arrival of macOS Catalina, Adobe CS5 is no longer an option. (I pay for the Creative Cloud subscription version of Photoshop, but have little to no use for the other apps in the larger, much more expensive suite.) For the past few years I’ve been soldiering on with an ancient copy of Adobe Illustrator CS5, the last version of Adobe’s full Creative Suite that I have installed on my Mac. This is mostly to generate t-shirt designs for The Incomparable, though sometimes it involved other uses of vector logos. Two or three times a year I need to open up and modify vector art files, generally sourced from Adobe Illustrator.

Affinity designer for t shirts