Art and Design

I have been using art apps now for  number of years.

When I got my first PC back in 1993, you used to get a floppy disk on the front of a computer magazine each month. These disks were normally crammed full of different applications, games and other media, as the size of he files was far smaller than they are in current day computing.

One month, I got my hands on a little application from an English company called Serif, it’s name was PagePlus. PagePlus was a full desktop publishing app that allowed for text and pictures to be placed on the screen anywhere you wanted. Text effects and similar could then be added to make a full page design. It was also multi page enabled, so you could create the pages of a book or magazine.

This app was awesome and had tools to create very basic vector shapes as well, no jagged edges and as the versions of the app increased, more functions and features got added.

PagePlus has now been retired by Serif and has been replaced with their Affinity series of apps. I was lucky enough to be able to be part of the beta test team for Affinity Designer a few years ago.

Designer, Photo and Publisher is now their lineup and are availble for both Mac and WIndows platforms, as well as for the iPad. Unlike rivalling platforms from Adobe, etc you only need to pay once for the Serif apps and get regular updates, which to me makes them a very cost effective design tool.

I have got these loaded on all of my machines, so wherever I’m working I have access to the applcation. I use pCloud online storage to save all my files, which synchronize to each of my machines, so my files are accessible again wherever I am working.

I have also been able to open and save in many proprietary file formats including Illustrator, Photoshop and even PDF. Where I am able to edit at layer level and amend documents on the fly, if a mistake has been found after it was originally created and forwarded on.

Throughout all of my projects on my Ether Laser, I have used one or more of the Affinity apps to assist with either creating a vector shape, or manipulating an image, so it is ready to be imported into the etcher app. If I have been sent artowrk to help someone else complete something they are working on, then I have to admit that Affinity has never let me down and I have always finished a project.

My latest updates are shown below, as always nice comments are welome along with suggestions.