Moat of the teams I see hiring designers are still using Adobe, and printshops take .ai files. But most of the solo designers I know use Affinity, and I’ve heard of one (albeit small) team that has swapped to Affinity for their whole team.

Affinity was just bought by Canva so idk how it might evolve over time, or if v3 will make compromises I don’t agree with. But I got v1 during Covid, loved it, converted to v2 as soon as it was available, still love it. Using all of them on the same file in the same window feels amazing.

Another downside is that designers rarely make asset packs for Affinity. But I’m pretty sure Affinity is able to import brush pack formats from one of the other big names, just not sure which (likely Adboe’s .abr)

I don’t like painting in Photo though, but that might be because I’m so used to Krita, which is designed for illustration in the first place. (They’re great, I might donate to them again actually)

I use Affinity Suite for work. Paid for it once, have it forever. Free updates until new editions, which are discounted if you own an older edition. Buy it for one platform (Windows), that’s a license for that edition of any other platform too. AND they regularly go on special, often to 50% off.

It doesn’t have AI content generation, but it does a few things Adobe doesn’t - like being able to use Photo and Designer from INSIDE Publisher, seamless like its a single program!

Affinity Photo (Photoshop), Designer (Illustrator), and Publisher (InDesign). Then Krita for raster illustration. That’s all I need as a professional

This is what I do, except I would add 700 and 236 at the end.

Well except I would probably add 700 and 116 or something, because my working memory fucking sucks and my brain drops digits very easily when there’s more than 1

I might. Then I can subtract 74 to get 74*14, and subtract 28 to get 72*13.

I don’t generally do that to ‘weird’ numbers, I usually get closer to multiples of 5, 9, 10, or 11.

But a computer stores information differently. Perhaps it moves closer to numbers with simpler binary addresses.

I’ve tried it a couple times and I hate it. The UI sucks, I can’t find shit, and they’ve stripped back control panel even further. Tried to help my mother with virtual disc’s and you can’t simply mount them anymore, instead there was some strange 3rd-party tool I’d never heard of and it didn’t even export files that were too deep in the folder tree. Fucking useless.

All the bloatware sucks, search defaulting to AI and Bing instead of your own computer sucks. Removing administrative controls sucks.

But I’m a visual designer and the market needs powerful industry-ready software like Adobe and Affinity. I can’t design publishing in fucking GIMP. The Linux alternatives aren’t enough. I’m considering using a Linux home machine with Mac for work but the apps I own already are Microsoft so it would be very expensive to switch. So I’ll probably end up using W11 and just complain the whole time.

Modern PCs don’t truly hibernate, they sleep. If the tower loses power its considered a hard reset.

If anything, Windows machines often have ‘fast boot’ enabled which saves certain things to state, so today’s manual shutdown (without power loss) is closer to old school hibernation than today’s ‘sleep’ is.

You can shutdownyour PC each night, but depending on what you’re working on it can disrupt workflow, so I understand why many people prefer to sleep instead.