Check out the 20+ new additions to the popular Illustrator rival, all available for owners to download today for free.
When Serif first released its pro-level, Mac-only rival to Illustrator, Affinity Designer, last October, it made great play of the fact that it was subscription-free: unlike Adobe's Creative Cloud apps, you only pay once.
And just to sweeten the deal further, the company promised that any updates to the software would also be free, "for at least two years".
So far they've kept their promise, and today Affinity Designer launches its first big update. Version 1.2 is now available to download via the Mac App Store.
What's new
The update is free for owners to download today
This free update for Affinity Designer owners introduces an intuitive, time-saving Corner tool, a much-requested text-on-a-path feature, and Pixel Alignment Mode for web & UI design.
A new capability to save undo History with documents lets you slide back in time to inspect a design – or go back and take it in a new direction – days, weeks or months after it was last edited.
Slide back in time to inspect a design, going back days, weeks or months
Affinity Designer's sister tool, the recently released Photoshop alternative Affinity Photo hasn't been forgotten either. With new seamless document switching into Affinity Photo beta and a common file format for saving without worry, it's now easier to use both apps and swap assets between them.
Saved document History also allows Affinity Photo to undo editing steps that were performed in Affinity Designer and vice versa.
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Performance enhancements and new language support are among the updates
Here's a comprehensive list of all the updates in version 1.2:
Text-on-a-path corner tool
German, Spanish, French and US English languages (and language selection)
Force Pixel Alignment mode for accurate UI and Web design
Added dashed line styles for Strokes
History can be saved with documents
Affinity app switching added to support Affinity Photo
Export slices to SVG, EPS and PDF formats
Open .ase (Adobe® Swatch Exchange) colour palettes
Import brushes automatically by double-clicking .afbrushes files
Even faster throughout, especially brush tools
More accurate colour management and colour picking
Improved import and export for PSD, PSD, and SVG
Improved EPS output with Affinity’s own EPS exporter
Enhanced Yosemite look and feel
Refreshed UI panels with new behaviours and improved reliability
Font display size preference for the UI
Rectangle and rounded rectangle shapes merged, and the ellipse, pie, an donut are merged
More brush customisation
Many OpenType, typography, and text performance enhancements
Improved stability throughout, plus fixes to improve OS X Lion Support
Plus 100s of other tweaks, improvements and fixes.
You can buy Affinity Designer on the Mac App Store for £39.99/€49.99/$49.99 with no subscription.
Tom May is an award-winning journalist and author specialising in design, photography and technology. His latest book, The 50th Greatest Designers, was released in June 2025. He's also author of the Amazon #1 bestseller Great TED Talks: Creativity, published by Pavilion Books, Tom was previously editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine.
