Just found another useful resource last night that I'm super impressed with. Maybe you've heard of it, maybe not.
All of us know about
Adobe PhotoShop,
Illustrator, and
InDesign. We also know that we have to spend $52.99
a month to use all three programs, which is useful only if we plan to use more than three
Creative Cloud apps
every month. Fortunately, we get a ton of apps for that price. Unfortunately, most of those apps are just add-ons to the big three (or four, if you include
Premier). Seems hardly worth it to pay over $600
a year to rent a bunch of apps we'd hardly use.
For years, I've been troubled by this price point because I really wanted PhotoShop for game and cover design, Illustrator for additional vector design, and InDesign for accurate layouts for my books. In fact, I've often thought I
needed InDesign to make my paperbacks industry standard.
Turns out, I don't need any of them.
When I searched for "indesign alternatives" on YouTube last night, I kept seeing videos for something called "Affinity Publisher." I'm usually skeptical of any software that claims to compete with the titans of industry, and it didn't help that the thumbnails for these videos were amateur-looking. But I checked out what they said about it, anyway.
The first video got me curious, so I checked out the more "official" videos. Finally, I watched a
30-minute video from someone who creates books.
And each video got me wanting this thing more and more.
So I bought it last night.
Turns out,
Affinity Publisher is so much like InDesign that I don't even know if there's a noticeable omission. From my understanding, the user-interface is actually easier than InDesign (and the free alternative,
Scribus). But here's the cool thing: It integrates with Affinity's other two flagship programs,
Photo (the worthy PhotoShop alternative) and
Designer (the worthy Illustrator alternative), by allowing you to press a button,
in Publisher, and switch immediately to the profile for the other program, allowing you to access all of its tools. That means you can edit images and other elements right from the page you're designing for your book, magazine, whatever.
It's probably no surprise that I also bought Photo and Designer, just to maintain the entire suite.
So how close to $600 a year did I come to buy these programs?
Well, they retail for $50 each. One-time purchase. Free updates forever (I believe).
And I got them during one of their 50% off sales. So I spent $25 for each one. I never have to buy
Adobe Anything now, but I can still do just about anything the Adobe products would let me do.
That said, if you're looking for an alternative to Adobe Creative Cloud that
you can own for a one-time payment at a fourth of the cost (or eighth if you get it during the same sale that I bought my copies in), I'd give Affinity a look. I'm impressed with it so far.
And yes, I'm totally porting my OHR instruction manuals to Publisher. Imagine learning how to play
Entrepreneur: The Beginning from a fancy guide!
Seriously, these are good programs and
worth the look.
EDIT: Cross-posting to my
blog.
