This is great for beginners (it prevents you from putting your repeat elements in the wrong place) and experts (it helps you avoid making your pattern blocky and predictable). When you create a seamless repeat pattern in Affinity, you can set up a live preview of your repeat, so you can keep an eye on the pattern in repeat as you create it. Here are a few things I love about Affinity Designer: Rather hear all this in video form? Check out my class on Affinity Designer: I show how I get around this issue in my new class.

While they haven’t developed that functionality within the program yet, there are several paid and free apps that I use that are just like the image trace tool in Illustrator. You may have heard that Affinity Designer is like Illustrator, except it doesn’t have the image trace tool, so it’s not as good as Illustrator. This program has totally replaced Illustrator and Photoshop for me (goodbye subscription fees!), and it has sped up my workflow considerably because I don’t have to transfer files to another device and boot up the ol’ lap top to start working. Then I discovered Affinity Designer for iPads. Then when iPads came out and I started transitioning all of my drawing to the iPad screen, I went through the cumbersome process of converting my iPad drawings to vectors and making patterns, designs, and layouts in Illustrator and Photoshop. As you all know, in those days there was no such thing as iPad drawing, and we all just accepted desktop and laptop computers as the norm. I’ve been working in Photoshop and Illustrator since I started art school in 2005. Not because I get an affiliate bonus when you buy it (I don’t), but because I love it so much I want to share it with the iPad art and design community! Spoiler: I’m going to try to convince you to get Affinity Designer for iPads.

Affinity sketch