Not another one of these?! No no, wait. Hear me out. For like 20 years, I’ve been using Adobe Illustrator as my main finishing tool. Up through CS5, I was happy with the product. It’s my go-to, everyday art tool, right after ink and paper. I can output at any DPI I need, even after the fact with no loss of clarity and it gives me really fine control. The problem is, Adobe got kind of greedy. Where once you could by the most recent update for $150, and it would last you a few years, now they want $20 a month for the same program. That’s $240 a year and as a hobbyist, that’s WAY too much money. Problem is, Adobe hasn’t exactly been challenged in the vector market up til now. The image above was not made with Illustrator (except for the live trace feature), it was made with Affinity Designer, a program made to work natively on the Mac, another huge bonus. The other big bonus is that it’s only $50 period. Ever. Does it do everything Illustrator does? No, but it’s getting damned close and it can do some things AI can’t. While the workflow is very different than what I’m used to, I think I can make this work for what I do and I’m going to try. The subscription model for software sucks. I’ve always bought my software, I never pirated it. I don’t make much off my work, but I still try here and there. I hope that they’ll continue to add features, perhaps even, finally, live trace so I can say goodbye to AI completely. The above image isn’t that interesting, but the fact that I could get the same result with a program other than Illustrator might mean a huge deal to those of us who can’t or won’t afford Adobe’s subscriptions.