Highlights: Affinity Designer for Windows

Last week came some big news for the web and graph­ic de­sign­ers com­munity – the long awaited Beta re­lease of Af­fin­ity De­sign­er for Win­dows is fi­nally here, cur­rently for free. Af­fin­ity De­sign­er is con­sidered one of Adobe Il­lus­trat­or's most ser­i­ous rivals. Its suc­cess­ful com­bin­a­tion of vec­tor and ras­ter tools, along with a reas­on­able pri­cing, made it a prefer­able choice – though only for Mac users. Un­til now. Be­low we've se­lec­ted some of Af­fin­ity De­sign­ers most in­triguing fea­tures:

1. Shapes

Creation and a wide range of modifications of about 20 vector shape objects.

2. Power Duplicate

Creates multiple copies of an object along with the transformations assigned to it.

3. Stroke Profile

Modifies the width alongside a vector drawn line for styling purposes (like when you are not using a tablet pen) or even for creating objects.

4. Transparency Tool

Applies different transparency modes to objects and provides further adjustments of the transparency intensity, direction and range.

5. Corner Tool

Rounds, fillets, concaves or cuts out a corner of an object.

6. Global Colors

To change a color everywhere it is used in a document by a single click.

7. Nondestructive Booleans

Allows boolean functions such as add, substract, intersect or divide while preserving both objects intact.

8. Color Palette From Document

Extracts a custom color palette using all colors in a document.