If anyone that designs in Adobe Illustrator on the Mac needs or is looking for a new software solution that doesn’t charge-by-the month, check out Affinity Designer by Seriff. I’ve used Adobe products for over 25 years in my past career but recently need to upgrade my Mac and didn’t want to continue paying $50 plus bucks a month for Adobe Illustrator Creative Cloud (now that I’m not working in the design biz anymore). So did some research and found as well as bought Affinity’s Designer off the Apple App Store. It’s approx $48 bucks but can be had for less during promotions. They also have a version for iPad as well. Give it a look if you’re Mac based and tired of the Adobe monthly tax. I’m pretty impressed and have actually bought their photo editing software as well. Now I can design in Affinity and export to V-Carve and then on to the CNC. Hope this helps someone else.
I use several smart tools that SVG is their native language and I agree. Affinity is some of the best bang for the buck out there. I like Inkscape as well and somehow end up using it more often than Affinity. Probably because Inkscape does great converting between file types.
Gotta check into Inkscape! Thanks for the tip!
I just use Inkscape for all my vector work. Affinity is compelling because of their CMYK support, but Inkscape does all I need for CNC. Though the latest release is far from useable on a Mac. It is actually faster using Crossover than native. If I could figure out the fonts, I’d only use Crossover.
0.02
-Tom
I haven’t had time to see how well Affinity Designer works with CMYK/RGB but I’m hoping they have a good grasp on that part of the software as I still do some designing for print. As for fonts, I have more than any one person should have after working for ad agency’s, newspapers and similar for 25 years. I’m still trying to find a good substitute for Suitcase Fusion that I used for many years but don’t want a monthly subscription… (yeah, they do it now too… asshats) But I have found having a good font manager solves a lot of issues rather than using Apple’s Font Book. I am still learning the V-Carve software but my plan is to turn all my fonts into outlines out of Affinity then output to V-Carve to turn it into something usable for the OneFinity CNC… or at least that’s what I’m hoping will happen.
Autodesk also makes a software called Graphic for Mac, iPad, & iPhone. Been using it for years and it is great! It is only $30.
Hmmm, never heard of it - I’ll have to check it out! I’ve been using Inkscape for year, though the latest version is nearly unusable on the Mac due to performance issues. Recently I stumbled across Affinity which has a native Mac version and CMKY support, but there is no free trial so I haven’t purchased it yet.