Affinity | in the art cave

My final project for 2018 was this logo and business card design for a small arboriculture company in Auckland.

The logo was hand-drawn and then tidied up in Affinity Photo. I wanted the letters to retain an ‘organic’ quality and so I resisted the temptation to turn it into a black and white vector image.

tree-line sketch in progress

completed trees ~ ink and acrylic

The tree-line sketch (or, if you prefer, tree line-sketch) was drawn in black ink. I painted over some areas to boost the shadows and highlights prior to scanning. I then edited the trees (ever so slightly) to ensure that the tree heights looked good underneath the text.

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As well as the pine/light brown colour, we also considered green and blue. Happily, the client went with pine brown which not only fits the brand identity beautifully, it also enables the finer details of the drawn elements to really stand out (the other colours were significantly darker when printed). And even though I was working on this right up until Christmas, I didn’t mind one bit because it just seemed so wonderfully 🌲🎄🌲 seasonally appropriate : )

https://affinity.serif.com

The cute sketch of Jasper I posted yesterday turned out to be the last project I will (probably) ever do in Photoshop. It’s a long story but the short version is that when I updated my Mac operating system a couple of weeks ago, my first update in six years, I lost the ability to use my Adobe software (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign). I had read somewhere that my software wouldn’t work properly if I didn’t uninstall and reinstall it and so that’s what I did. Silly me. Down the rabbit hole I went. Reinstalling them didn’t work. Backups didn’t work. My software was no longer recognised and all was lost. It was really quite upsetting but not entirely unexpected.

Now I’m not telling you this because I’m looking for sympathy. I’m also not looking for solutions or workarounds. I’m not even going to contact Adobe to try and sort it out. Really? Yep. It’s a done deal — I’ve been on borrowed time with my CS5 software for years. I knew this day was coming and, now that it’s here, I’ve decided to embrace change.

The short-term pain of losing CS5 has given way to the discovery of Affinity’s award-winning graphic design and photo editing software. Check out their product videos — they’re really impressive. I have now jumped ship and am learning how to navigate Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo. Thankfully, it’s fairly intuitive, the GUI looks and feels familiar, and there are lots of online video tutorials. I don’t have a replacement for InDesign yet but I am eagerly awaiting Affinity’s release of Publisher later this year. The Affinity software is also very reasonably priced (no subscription, which helped to seal the deal for me) and they are offering free updates.

If you’re a Mac user (sorry, it is Mac only*), I recommend having a look at Affinity. I think it’s awesome. I love that I can import my old psd, ai, and pdf files. I also love that I’m now using creative software that is current and not six years old (that’s the equivalent of about half a century in software years).

So I’m saying goodbye, Adobe. There will be no more tears. I have no regrets. It was fun while it lasted.

* Affinity have announced that they plan to launch Designer and Photo on Windows later in the year.

in the art cave

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