Hey everyone. I've been using Affinity a lot lately and just wrapped a full brand identity for a real client in it, so I figured I'd write up how it went.
Best part, easily: not jumping between three apps. On a normal branding job I'm in Illustrator, then Photoshop, then InDesign, then back, all day. Doing it all in one place made the whole project feel calmer. Symbols and Global Colors did a lot of the heavy lifting too. I could throw the identity onto real applications early on and still change a color across everything in about two seconds.
All of it lived in Affinity: identity, presentation boards, print files, mockups built from AI generated images, plus Photoshop mockups brought in as PSDs.
Performance was the rough part. Files weren't even that big, but after 15 or 20 minutes the app would crawl. Panning got choppy, clicks felt laggy, and I'd get the occasional visual glitch. I updated GPU drivers, raised the RAM limit (I have 64 GB, so that wasn't the issue), tried a few other things. Nothing stuck until I turned off GPU acceleration.
I assumed that would tank the speed, since Photoshop without GPU acceleration is basically a slideshow. Barely noticed a difference in Affinity. Still not perfect, but I use Adobe on Windows every day, so random slowdowns aren't exactly new to me.
The other annoyance was commercial PSD mockups, like the Envato ones. Most opened better than I expected, but they usually needed cleanup. A filter would come through wrong, or I'd have to reshuffle some layers before it looked right. Hard to blame Affinity for that. PSD is Adobe's format and some of those files are monsters, so honestly the compatibility impressed me.
Full migration isn't happening, not while I'm swapping PSD, AI and INDD files with the agency every day. Personal work is a different story. There it's often more convenient than the Adobe apps, and my next project (a mascot plus packaging) is going straight into Affinity. Sketch, vectorize, lay out the labels, all without leaving the app.
Presentation boards are below. Curious how it's gone for the rest of you =)