Designers working with desktop publishing may want to take a look at Affinity Publisher. The tool, which is now available for Mac and Windows platforms, is emerging as a powerful and flexible design option.

.Mac App of the Year 2019.Fully compatible with macOS Big Sur and optimised for Apple’s M1 chips. Bring your vision to life with Affinity Publisher, the most advanced professional publishing software from the developers of the award-winning Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo apps. Serif, a UK-based graphic art and design software company, has just dropped a new photo editing app for the Mac to compete with Adobe Photoshop. Affinity Photo, released today as a public beta. Latest Version: 1.8.6. Licence: $49.99. What does Affinity Publisher do?.Mac App of the Year. Bring your vision to life with Affinity Publisher, the most advanced professional publishing software from the developers of the award-winning Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo apps. From magazines, books, brochures, posters, reports. Optimised for the latest tech on Windows and Mac – and chosen by Apple as its Mac App of the Year – Affinity Publisher is the next generation of professional publishing software. From books, magazines and marketing materials, to social media templates, website mock-ups and more, this incredibly smooth, intuitive app gives you the power to combine your images, graphics and text to make beautiful layouts. Affinity Publisher for desktop tutorials Here’s a selection of tutorials to help you get started with Affinity Publisher.

The tool is part of the Serif line of graphic design products, which also includes Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer, both super-capable platforms in their own right.

Here’s a look at Affinity Publisher and how it compares to a tool you may already be familiar with – Adobe InDesign.

Affinity Publisher For Ipad Pro

What is Affinity Publisher?

Affinity Publisher is a professional design software package. It’s made for desktop publishing, including books, magazines, marketing collateral but can also be used for digital materials as well.

The app allows you to manipulate and work with images, graphics, and text to create almost endless layout possibilities with workflow boosts to make large documents easy to work with and manage.

It works with other Serif products as well as native Adobe files and has the power to handle complex vector elements without losing functionality or speed.

The biggest reason Affinity Publisher may be growing in the marketplace is cost. It does not include a subscription model and runs off your local machine. It works on Mac or Windows computers and the download is $49.99 with a free trial available. (You can get it directly from the Affinity Publisher website or in the Mac App Store.)

Affinity Publisher Basics

Affinity Publisher makes it easy to try this tool with a great price and single app download pricing model. It’s robust and includes everything you would want in a desktop publishing app.

The only downsides are that it can feel unfamiliar and a little clunky if you are used to InDesign. Some of that is likely because it is different or maybe because the tool is a little newer and they are still working out some of the finer details.

The Affinity package of tools has a neat feature – StudioLink – that lets you hop between tools in the same app. If you are planning to switch to all Affinity products for design tasks, this is a time-saving option that’s highly functional.

When you get into the software itself, everything is there – you can see some of these key features in the next section – although some things work a little differently than what you may be accustomed to with Adobe products.

Key differences include lack of document setup presets on launch – although you can find third-party templates on design marketplaces – and master pages and layers that require a little more thought until you get used to us.

Designers working on laptops may love this: The software is light and fast without losing render or image quality.

Download Affinity Publisher

Affinity Publisher Key Features

So, what can Affinity Publisher do? That’s always the big question when it comes to using or switching to a new tool.

Key features include:

• Layout functionality for double page spreads, live master pages, custom shaped frames (including for text), frame linking, tables, and ability to share across apps or devices
• Tons of text manipulation options and control with decorations, drop caps, paths, artistic options, baseline grid, and flow features
• Pixel-perfect graphics that you can link or embed, plus non-destructive layer adjustments
• Pen and node tools, boolean operations, layer effects, and fill options
• Ability to package and export files
• Data merge tools for complex documents with an external data element (supports text/CSV, JSON, and Excel files)
• Live preflight checks
• Color control with end to end CMYK, spot color support, Pantone library, and ICC color profiles
• Asset management tools to help you keep most-used elements at hand
• Preview mode for grids, guides, bleed, and margins

Affinity Publisher vs. Adobe InDesign

The biggest tool comparison is Affinity Publisher vs. Adobe InDesign when it comes to desktop and print publishing. For those not working with either tool on a daily basis, they may seem almost identical at a glance.

They are pretty stiff competitors with the edge going to InDesign because of time on the market and familiarity for so many users. But cost and function could negate that advantage.

Affinity Publisher has all the layout tools regularly use including master pages, spreads, grids, tables, typography options, text flow, presentation or print output settings, and more. You can import IDML files, use the preflight checker, create smart master pages, and work with OpenType fonts. Linking or embedding graphics files is a non-issue.

There are plenty of other similarities as well.

• Works on Mac and Windows desktops
• Have fairly intuitive interfaces
• Allows you to work with native Adobe files
• Ability to create pro quality documents for print or digital publishing
• Plenty of tutorials and templates available
• Include free trials (Affinity Publisher’s is 30 days, compared to 7 for Adobe InDesign)
• Core tools and publishing functionality are similar
• Excellent export capability in a number of file formats

The most obvious difference between Publisher and InDesign is probably price and pricing structure.

Affinity Publisher comes with a one-time fee when you download it, $49.99.

InDesign is part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite of software and comes with a monthly fee, which is based on your plan. The single app price is $20.99 per month.

Conclusion

Affinity Publisher is a powerful design and layout tool that’s highly comparable to Adobe InDesign.

It’s flexible and easy to learn. And the price is hard to beat.

For current Adobe InDesign users, it could be a little tougher to switch software because while it has much of the same functionality and end result, it just feels different to use. Switching will totally depend on your comfort level.

Either way, the download and trial are worth a try!

Affinity Publisher Templates

In this feature, we've covered the basics of Affinity Publisher with tutorials and software comparisons, as well as the best Affinity Publisher templates.

At the end of 2020 we launched an exciting update for the macOS versions of our apps, one that would allow users to tap straight into the potential of Apple’s next generation of Macs and, in turn, do more, faster. This is thanks to the update’s full compatibility with Apple’s latest macOS update, Big Sur, and optimisation for M1—Apple’s newly-launched chip, specifically designed for the Mac.

This is great news for our users because the architecture of the M1, particularly having such a high-performance GPU with unified memory with the CPU, is perfect for professional creative applications. The advantages are particularly noticeable when working on documents with thousands of pixel layers, vector objects and text. Edits to pixel layers are best handled on the GPU, while vector and text on the CPU, so when you have unified memory, it allows much faster handling of these complex documents.

Our fully-featured iPad apps already take advantage of very similar architecture on the A-series chips and ever since developing for iPad, we’d always hoped that chips with this architecture would eventually come to Mac—and now they have.

Our developers were lucky enough to receive the DTK from Apple so we could prime all our apps for M1 before launch and get them up and running natively on the new hardware, making Affinity apps the first professional creative applications to offer native M1 support.

With our apps now primed for this transition, Mac customers with M1 can expect a more responsive user experience with respect to painting, pixel editing, filter effects, document rendering and more. It also enables many more elements like adjustment layers and live filters to be maintained before performance suffers—allowing for a more non-destructive workflow, even on the most complex of documents.

Affinity Publisher Guide

To sum it up, M1 makes our apps run faster, smoother and feel more responsive than ever before (we’ve even seen speed increases of over 3x faster running on the new MacBook Air). It’s definitely a big step forward for Mac, and we can’t wait to see how the rest of the Mac range develops in the future.

Affinity Publisher Mac App Store App

If you own the apps already, make sure you download the latest update today for free, otherwise head over to our homepage to learn more about our professional creative software.