Food Zine - Revised Cover and Affinity Suite (Patreon)

So as you know the food zine has been completed and released for all Patrons for awhile now. My next step is to release it to the world...! I really want to offer the handmade print edition for public sale and I've finished a bunch of inventory and prep work in order to make that happen. However, because of the intricate nature of the set, it isn't really realistic for me to offer very many copies.

So I've been thinking about also making a print-on-demand edition of the book. For this I thought it would be best if it had a different cover. 

I also have been trying to kick Adobe to the curb lately. It's interesting, maybe five-ten years ago Adobe was the undisputed choice of "serious" graphic design professionals across the board. Then they changed to their Creative Cloud model and a lot of people (myself included) started to get sour about it. CC makes sense if you are literally a professional using it every day. And as a hobbyist it's nice to be able to access the entire creative suite with your subscription............ however. For someone like me who only uses it on nights and weekends the cost was a bit steep. 

Then ClipStudio started releasing some massive improvements and suddenly the "undisputed" part of the Adobe discussion started to get a bit squishy. By this point I have largely switched over to ClipStudio except for a few small functions that Adobe still does better, like graphic design layout, cleaning up scans and photos, and batch actions. My old "pre cloud" versions of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator started to get less and less stable, so I started looking around for alternatives!

One that came up in my research was the Affinity Suite. It was half price, so I figured it was worth checking out. (This is not sponsored at all btw, I just know that this is a scary switch for a lot of people so I wanted to talk about it.)

So far my experience with it has been pretty good. It's a fast, stable and responsive program. Anything that I've wanted to do has been easy to figure out. I was able to put together the cover shown in the header photo in about an hour and a half (including deleting the art from the paper background which takes a lot of work.) I'm using it for graphic design, not painting, so I can't speak to its brushes or ability to extend its brushes, but so far no problems using it for cleanup. Some things I like...

• "Fixed scale" is the default for transform tool. (In PS you have to hold "shift".) This took a bit to get used to but now it seems obvious. 
• You can double click to select objects, regardless of what layer they're on. This is something Clip can do too and it's one of the Most Annoying Things PS still can't do for some reason. At least when I last used it. 
• Anything you might want to do in PS so far Affinity Photo can do. It has nice adjustment layers, it doesn't try to reinvent the UI wheel too hard, and it can do macros and batch actions well. 
• The export tool is also quite nice, actually. 

Affinity Publisher is also quite nice. This is used to prepare documents for print, and as someone who is just barely competent in InDesign it was an easy switch. 

So far I haven't been able to figure everything out (I can't make complex paths for display boxes yet) but document setup is FAST and easy and it has lots of templates. It seems like it's gearing itself to be helpful for social media as well as print which is........ smart. Very smart. 

Some things I like...

• Same "fixed scale" default for transform. 
• You can drag and drop onto your blank pages............. if there's a master it will snap to that (and default align-centre and scale-to-fit), but you can also drag it off-canvas to create an independent frame that can be moved around. 
• The default scaling feature inside frames is very... very nice. It's very difficult to explain in words but laying out a comic like this (where it's finished pages into boxes) was SO easy. 

With the experience I've had so far I'm considering picking up Designer too (the "illustrator" equivalent). I definitely use Illustrator the least and have mostly switched over to Inkscape for vector work, but there are a few things that Inkscape is still annoying for and I'm curious if these two softwares can maybe work together better. 

Anyway, I'm gonna order up a few Print-on-Demand test prints and let's see how that technology has progressed as well. I hope you enjoyed my little inside-baseball software update lol. If you have any questions about the Affinity Suite let me know, I'm still a beginner but I'm happy to share my honest experience.