The overall design of your app plays a huge role in its success. It is up to the design team to unleash their creative genius and come up with ann impressive UI.
Conceptualizing and building a professional design are two very distinct things. In order to build a good design, the artist must feel comfortable with the tools in front of him.
For a long time, the industry standard has been the Adobe stack (Photoshop, Illustrator etc). In this article, I will be taking a close look at a modern new alternative to these classics.
Introduction
Affinity Designer is a professional graphic design app for the Mac. It is comparable in many ways to Adobe Illustrator and Sketch app thanks to its vector editing heart.
However in contrast to the much busier, classic Adobe Illustrator UI, Affinity employs a clean, modern, intuitive interface, making it easy to learn and very beginner-friendly.
A huge upside is Affinity's business model. There is a good trade off between power and price. You can get a license for USD $24.99!
The UI
The UI of the app is very similar to what we see in the Adobe package or Sketch App. It sports a top toolbar, two side toolbars, the working canvas and a thin hint bar at the bottom of the page.
The top bar in itself is divided into three main sections:
- The Persona toolbar
- The default functionalities toolbar
- The context toolbar
The Persona Toolbar
The persona toolbar is a key concept and a feature that distinguishes Affinity Designer from other apps out there. Personas are used to easily and quickly switch between sets of tools and functions, based on what your objectives are. There are three personas at the time of this writing:
1. The Draw Persona
It changes the UI so it serves useful tools to work on creating or modifying vector graphics.
2. The Pixel Persona
Pixel persona allows you to edit your vector drawing based on pixels. Tools such as brushes, retouching tools, and pixel selection tools will be available to you.
3. Export Persona
The export persona is used to output entire layers, groups, objects or regions as graphics in your chosen format.
Personas make it very easy to find the tools you need. Every time you access a persona the left toolbar changes, offering other functionalities and tools based on the currently active one.
The Default Toolbar
The default toolbar keeps the most common tools. Such as: *Buttons - that allow you to switch between standard or retina viewing modes.
- Object controls for ordering (bringing forward or backward etc.)
- Transforming(rotating)
- Aligning
- Snapping
- Combining
- Targeting
The Context Toolbar
In the context toolbar, the different options change based on the currently active tool or functionality you have chosen. The dynamic UI makes it very intuitive to find what you are looking for without going in too deep in menus and submenus as you might traditionally expect.
The hint bar
The hint bar is located at the bottom of the page. It saves a huge amount of time by providing tips and shortcuts based on the functionalities, tools or options you have hovered your mouse over, or selected.
Continue reading %Affinity Designer: Can a $25 Vector Editor Really Cut It?%
by Mateo Prifti via SitePoint
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