I was a keyboard shortcut kind of guy with Illustrator. Affinity Designer node control is pretty much like the CorelDraw smoothness though much more savvy in terms of snapping and aligning, also it will take some short time to switch because of keystroke differences, but all in all it was worth the price, already bought the three Affinity Softwares to full switch into Affinity Suite.

this just reminded me of my very, very first "image editor" I bought ages ago for the Atari TT (mid 1990-ies): Arabesque. It also had raster and vector editing you could freely combine and switch between. I did a lot of illustrations back then to be used in Calamus ST; an incredible publishing app (on Atari !!) but a total vendor lock-in. At that time the only other program that could do vector and pixel on the PC was the horrible Corel Draw. I had to work with it again in 2019 and using their UI was still a horrible experience.

You actually missed one the coolest aspects of the Isometric panel in your demonstration. You can place objects on the grid so they match the grid. If you press "Fit to plane" the object will transform itself to which current plane you have active (Front, Side, or Top). So you could make that cube by just having 3 rectangle shapes and then fit them to each of those planes so you can edit them along the grid lines. It's also possible to keep adding shapes to those planes as you draw them. It's pretty darn sweet. :D

I switched to AD since last year. By the way, Affinity Photo is also cool.

First, I would say that the best reason to switch from Illustrator to Affinity Designer is because you don't need Adobe Illustrator's vast featureset so shouldn't be paying for it. These are two very different programs, but I had an interesting experience recently. Two actually. The first is that I opened a Photoshop file in Illustrator and all of the live text was converted to images if the text had any kind of effect on it. I got curious and opened the Photoshop file in AD and it opened with all of the live text still live. That was impressive and a shame for Adobe. The next thing that happened is, I got a kind of heavy pdf catalog from a client and was asked to make changes to the catalog. I opened it with Illustrator. If I embedded all of the elements, in order to edit them, then the whole thing became impossible to work with because of Illustrator's terrible performance. Once again I thought about Affinity Designer. I opened the document in AD and performance was perfectly fine. Once again, it makes Adobe look awful. Furthermore, Affinity Publisher can also directly open the pdf document. Adobe InDesigan can not. You can place it and very, very clumsily place each page, one by one into a single page in InDesign. They're all initially linked images. They have to be, otherwise, you'd have a ton of elements from every page all mixed up on one page in Indesign. And I'm sure that if I'd embeded all of the elements, the performance would have been the same as Illustrator. So, Serif seems to be doing some real magic with performance. In the end though, the pdf document which was originally 34mb, became 97mb. All I did was add one small jpeg on the first page and export to a new pdf. So, that's a show stopper.

great video! never seen Affinity, very interesting

Please help me with one function that I have been trying hard to find.. How to copy a line between 2 anchor points separately. THanks in advance

Try using some of those other features listed below in the isometric panel. Fit to plane is great, you can just draw something as normal (like some type) and then snap it to the chosen plane. I've been using Affinity Designer since 2014. It's way faster than illustrator.

15 years in the game, I switch to AD & AP. I own the program for a good price with just the tools I need with a better UI.

excellent

affinity designer for the win!

why do you use a mouse, for a presentation on why you prefer AD? (it should be very good, like how you really use the software)

Isometry can be drawn more easily if you click Edit in Plane! :-)

I find AD2 slow but can give nice results. Illustrator is much faster.

Is the quality for flat artwork the same in affinity as in AI? I'm looking to make flat artwork for my website and don't have experience with either.. but looking to start some tutorials. AI is what I initially was going to work with but the price of AI, is just too much. I won't be using it often, after I make the designs but would like something to have on hand to make adjustments.. so affinity just seems like a better fit.

Loved your explanation of the program. I've been looking for alternatives to Adobe illustrator and photoshop as I've been on the student price for the past year or so but the full subscription price of $50 a month is a lot. I will definitely check out affinity designer!

What about vectornator? Its free

How Nice AD may be... i still strugle to work with al my clients who are in the Adobe loop. And that is 95% of them. I also miss the great Photoshop / Illustrator combo. With Adobe cloud this all works so seamless. I tried to switch over to AD, but it is not working so far. I also see people notice how good Affinity Photo is. Yes, it is a nice tool, but is so far away where Photoshop is. Specially the AI build in these days in Photoshop doing a lot of stuff for you in seconds.. it is money making time i can spend on other things. So for me under the line.. Adobe still rules and dominating the professional world. And i dont think that will change soon.

The biggest con for me for Affinity is the lack of specific tutorials.

affinity design is better and easy to use it

You forgot to mention the most important reason. Illustrator's INTERFACE! He's terrible! It's like being in 1998! I tried to love him, but it's impossible