Nottingham, United Kingdom – Serif has today announced a significant update to its popular professional vector design app, Affinity Designer. This is the third major update the app has received since being launched in October last year, and as promised Serif continues to offer these updates free to existing owners of the app, despite the fact they do not charge a subscription. To tempt new customers they have also decided to drop the price by 20% for one-week.
Since it burst onto the scene in October 2014, Affinity Designer has gained a huge number of fans with its focus on speed, stability and lack of bloat. This was recognised in June this year with a highly coveted Design Award from Apple-the dream accolade for any OS X developer. Since then Affinity Designer has regularly been the best selling Graphics & Design application on the Mac App Store and now promises to offer creatives even more with this latest update.
One of the main headline features is the addition of an incredibly flexible artboard tool. As well as being able to create artboards of any size, or quickly create to common device sizes, you get the added flexibility of being able to group artboards, have artboards within artboards and even create them from any shape, not just square-functionality unique to Affinity Designer. The tool goes right through to export where you can instantly export all your artboards with independent export options, or across multiple pages as a PDF document.
“Without doubt artboards have been our most requested new feature since we launched, so we’re delighted to get this functionality in,” said Ashley Hewson, Serif’s Managing Director. “It really is a must-have feature for UI and responsive design, so it’s great to be widening the use case of Affinity Designer into these areas too.”
Another big focus of this update has been on professional print, and a whole raft of features have now been added. Spot colours are now supported, including a full library of Pantone(R) swatches, along with overprint, bleed and trim controls. Output options have also been dramatically improved with the addition of PDF/X support up to PDF/X-4 so Affinity Designer can deal with everything from initial concept to press-ready output.
And there are plenty of other improvements too including a rotatable canvas, customisable keyboard shortcuts, global colours, all new typography controls, and significantly improved import and export of PSD, PDF, SVG and EPS formats.
The team have certainly been busy as alongside the update to Affinity Designer, as Serif have also released a new update to Affinity Photo today which includes advanced image stitching, image stacks, and new extensions for Apple Photos app.
“The success we have had with our Affinity products this year has been truly amazing, but it’s not something we are taking for granted,” said Ashley. “We are working round the clock, typing faster than ever, to keep regular updates coming-it’s a competitive market and we are more determined than ever to keep ourselves ahead.”
System Requirements:
* OS X 10.7 or later
* 64-bit processor
* 175 MB
Pricing and Availability:
Both updates are available now, free to owners of each app via the Mac App Store. For new customers they are available at the special offer price of just GBP 29.99/Euro 39.99/$39.99 each until December 15th, after which they revert to the normal price of GBP 39.99/Euro 49.99/$49.99.
Affinity Designer 1.4
Purchase and Download (Mac App Store)
Vimeo Video (Overview)
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Serif was founded in 1987, and through its history has launched many award winning graphics software for Windows. 5 years ago Serif set out to produce an entirely new range of professional graphic applications for Mac under a new brand called Affinity. Built exclusively for Mac with the power and sophistication the platform offers, and driven by creative designers from the outset, Affinity is the new name in high quality, next-generation design apps for professionals. Conceived and developed by a passionate team of artists and programmers, Affinity gives designers exactly what they need for the highest quality artwork, photos and designs – accurate, high quality tools in fast, innovative, reliable apps with flair. All Material and Software (C) Copyright 1987-2015 Serif. All Rights Reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, Mac OS X and Macintosh are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. Other trademarks and registered trademarks may be the property of their respective owners.