Is Affinity Publisher the Adobe InDesign alternative?
If you have worked with creative software for long enough you recognise the cycle of change. Those of us with our nose to the air sit up and pay attention like prairie dogs on their mounds. Something is coming, best be prepared.
When I started out in publishing, it was the now forgotten Aldus Pagemaker that ruled the desktop publishing world. This was the 1980s and a revolution in page design was getting under way. Neville Brody was doing exciting things in the ‘Face’ magazine and everybody wanted a piece of that action. Publishers saw a way to free up design and save money at the same time. Those early days were full of pitfalls and restrictions. Designers who had never used a computer struggled with the alien mouse interface but the benefits were overwhelming and the cost savings persuasive.
However, Pagemaker was a flawed tool and when QuarkXpress appeared we looked at its strange new interface with text boxes and linking icons, typographical control and better still real precision, and we knew it was time to change. QuarkXpress went on to dominate the magazine publishing and then Newspaper publishing world. The freedom of expression aligned with the exacting control of typography and image placement made it the popular choice for all designers. QuarkXpress was King and unassailable. An army of plugins and extensions grew up around Xpress and the start of publishing workflow tools had Xpress at their heart.
Over at Adobe their flagship tool Photoshop was getting established as the go to image manipulation tool, offering cutting edge features previously only available on massively expensive dedicated graphics computers. Adobe built on its strengths with Illustrator then bought and later killed Altsys Freehand the competing vector program. When Adobe then bought Pagemaker, it seemed an odd move given the seemingly unassailable dominance of QuarkXpress. Still, those of us ever on the watch for change started to sniff the air.
When InDesign version 1 appeared at the close of the millennium, we took a look and largely concluded that compared to QuarkXpress it just wasn’t good enough. However, two year later in 2002 Adobe InDesign 2 was released and we all sat up and paid attention. The flaws with version 1 and 1.5 were gone and behold a whole new raft of features were presented. Features that Xpress could only dream of. Still QuarkXpress was now entrenched in all publishers’ workflows. Whole businesses had grown up around Quark. Pre-press house, design agencies, publishing plants all had embedded QuarkXpress. As compelling as InDesign was could publishers justify the colossal effort required to shift to Adobe?
So the benefits were weighed and the tests were done and questions were asked. In the end the consensus was we wanted to stay with Quark but we wanted Quark to catch up with the new features offered by Indesign. Eventually groups of like-minded publishers called on Quark to lift the now stagnating Xpress to a new competitive standard using Indesign as the benchmark. The staggering response from Quark still astounds me. In front of the leading consumer magazine publishers of the world Quark’s official line was “You are no longer our priority”. Many of us that attended that meeting were genuinely on the fence before the session. After the meeting our collective minds were made up. We were moving to Adobe InDesign. Adobe were going out of their way to win the hearts of publishers and designers; they were innovating at an alarming rate and once again the features within InDesign meant creativity could be unleashed whilst saving money.
So the world turns and Adobe consolidated its creative software, bringing InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator closer together, unifying the interfaces creating links and making the three a powerhouse for the whole design community. The industries threw out Quark (All be it reluctantly and over a very protracted time period) and set Adobe up as the new sovereign. And so it has been for the past decade or more. Adobe rules the creative space and has started to use that monopoly to feed its shareholders. The innovation has slowed and a subscription scheme is in place. Don’t get me wrong here, even with the subscription pricing the quality and range of the Adobe creative suite is justifiable to most companies and individuals making a decent living from design. However, there is a sense of unease from those of us dependent on creative software tools. Emails intimating legal threats for users of old licenses don’t sit well with the creative mind set. An increase in license fees that impacts smaller teams and individuals is of concern. Those that depend on Adobe are starting to ask the question, what if they do increase pricing across the board, could we cope? Are there alternatives? Again, the prairie dogs are taking to their mounds and looking around.
I became aware of Affinity around five years ago when asked to open beta test their Photo software. Since then the company has gone from strength to strength producing viable alternatives to Photoshop, Illustrator and this year InDesign. All three products from Affinity, Photo. Designer and Publisher are professional tools that continue to grow and develop at a remarkable rate. The pricing is undeniably attractive at a fraction of the Adobe equivalent but more important to many is the new approach to innovation. The ability to use all three environments through the persona metaphor is compelling. The designers can be working in a layout and yet have the specialised tools of photo manipulation or vector art available to them without leaving the page. There is something magical about seeing live update of vector or image changes on the actual layout in real time. This along with the lightning speed to refresh Affinity’s tools are starting to look like software written for the 2020s.
So is this the start of the new cycle? Like Quark before it Adobe is entrenched in our businesses, in our workflows and more importantly in our mindsets. More so, a whole generation have grown up with Adobe software being the only professional option.
The real question appears to be. Is there enough of a reason to switch from Adobe to Affinity? For some that question has already been answered with over two million people buying into the Affinity solutions. For publishers and design agencies and the more cautious of us it’s a complex set of decisions. It is natural to want to stay with what is familiar and that which requires the least amount of change but that option has rarely turned out well.
What I will say is that those of us who look for signs of change are sitting up and paying attention. It’s time to put these new tools to the test and start to think the previously unthinkable…again.
As always I’d love to hear your thoughts.
