Watching Gamecocks Women’s Basketball. So much talent on this roster. I think they are going to be fun to watch this year.

One app, three modes: The most interesting thing about the new version of Affinity isn’t the price.

When I became a designer 30 years ago, you needed three types of apps: a page layout app, a photo editing app and a vector app. You purchased those apps from whoever had the features you needed. Quark Xpress and Adobe Pagemaker1 were your options for page layout. Macromedia Freehand2 and Adobe Illustrator were your vector options. And while there were other photo apps, Adobe Photoshop was the dominant professional photo editor.

Quark missed the boat on Apple’s shift to OS X. Adobe purchased and discontinued Freehand. Without strong competition, Adobe’s Creative Suite app bundle essentially made InDesign free for designers who needed Photoshop and Illustrator anyway. Quark faded. Adobe switched to the subscription-based Creative Cloud model and became the only game in town.

But even with no competition, Adobe still offered separate apps for page layout, illustration and photo editing.

Affinity tried to be a non-subscription alternative to Adobe and so the original versions of Affinity tried to match the Adobe structure. Affinity Designer was Illustrator. Affinity Photo was Photoshop. Affinity Publisher was InDesign. However, the new Affinity is a single app, with vector, pixel and page layout modes. A completely different interface model. We don’t need three different apps any more. We just need one.

This unified model makes sense for the modern era of computing that is mostly focused on laptops and tablets. In playing with the new Affinity since its release, switching between modes is intuitive and I like the approach. (I was even able to easily hide the Canva AI tab that I wasn’t interested in.) Being able to freely switch between vector and pixel modes is liberating. On my M1 MacBook Pro, the Affinity app is absurdly fast.

I’ve been using Affinity off and on for 10 years mostly for personal projects.3 To be honest, I’ve mainly supported them because I wanted an Adobe alternative to exist. With Canva’s purchase and transformation of Affinity into a modern design app, I think they are posed to finally provide a realistic alternative to Adobe’s subscription model. It will be interesting to see how Adobe responds.

Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008, an Adobe user since 1994, and an Affinity user since 2015.

  1. Adobe purchased Pagemaker from Aldus. ↩︎

  2. Aldus Freehand became Macromedia Freehand and then Adobe Freehand. For what it’s worth, Freehand had multipage layouts way back in the 1990s. ↩︎

  3. I looked back at my email and found the download link for Affinity Designer in December 2015! ↩︎

Watched: Star Wars Rebels S3E5, The Last Battle 🍿

“Battles leave scars, some you can’t see.”

I’m conflicted about Canva making Affinity free. On one hand, Affinity will continue to provide a high-quality option to an Adobe subscription that won’t break the bank. But I don’t trust free software to be there for the long haul…

My peer-reviewed journal article, Logo Love? An Exploration of American Consumers’ Critical Attitudes toward Logos, is finally live on Visual Communications Quarterly. Excited to finally get this released.

When you start your day discovering a plumbing issue… it’s not a crisis, but it is something I’m going to have to deal with when I get home tonight. Hopefully, it is something I can just handle…

Finally made it to City Limits Barbeque. Even with all the hype, it exceeded my expectations. Outstanding.

Impressed with the new Methodical Coffee in The Bull Street District in Columbia. Really awesome to see this area finally coming together.

Methodical Coffee Columbia. A modern café interior features a central coffee bar with baristas serving customers and an upper level with additional seating.

I’m taking the day off from work to just be a Ph.D. student today. I’ve got a paper to work on, I’m attending a research symposium and I’ve scheduled a meeting with our grad school coordinator about my dissertation process and comps.

Rian Hughes is one of my favorite type designers. This brief interview covering his 30 years of type design and promoting his Kickstarter was wonderful. (Also, I completely backed the Kickstarter!)

So if I’m reading the Apple/F1 announcement correctly, my F1 TV subscription will be rolled into Apple TV, which I already pay for as part of the Apple One bundle… so… once less subscription, I guess.

My family loves the State Fair. I love how much they love the State Fair. (I don’t actually love the State Fair.)

Interesting that Microsoft released some process images on Instagram to explain the thinking behind their new icons. They are correctly treating this icon refresh as a type of logo rollout and people who care about the icons will appreciate the glimpse into the redesign process.

Hate to see that South Carolina basketball’s Chloe Kitts tore her ACL and will miss the season. She’s one of my favorite Gamecocks, and hopefully, she’ll come back strong.

Picking an NFL team

I typically watch one or two NFL games a week, and yet, I don’t really have an NFL team. (I’m currently watching the Detroit Lions and Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday Night Football as I write this.)

When I was little, I was a Cowboys fan. We’re taking about the Tom Landry, Danny White, Tony Dorsett era Cowboys. When Jerry Jones bought the team and got rid of all my favorite players and their legendary coach, I decided I was no longer a Cowboys fan. I briefly pulled for the Bears when I lived in Chicago and they won the Super Bowl, but I was never fully invested and then, they fired Ditka.

In the early 2000s, I had a fantasy football team each season. That meant that I pulled for players, not teams. Every year, I’d pick a new team and have a new rooting interest.

I’m a South Carolina Gamecocks fan, so I’ve often pulled for teams with former Gamecocks. But trades and free agency happen. The Bears and Alshon Jeffrey became the Eagles and Alshon Jeffrey. The 49ers and Deebo Samuels became the Commanders and Deebo Samuels. Picking a team based on a player means that when a player leaves, your affinity for that team fades.

I’ve only been to one NFL game — a battle between the Miami Dolphins and New York Jets when my dad lived in Miami. Both teams were terrible and I can’t remember who won. I obviously didn’t develop an affinity for either of those teams.

Every so often, I feel like I’m missing out by not having a favorite NFL team. But how do I choose?

After thinking about it for a couple of weeks, I think that the most logical team for me to pull for is the Carolina Panthers. They have been terrible, but seem to be improving. (They just beat the Cowboys today.) They usually have a couple of Gamecocks on the roster. I do love their black and blue color scheme. And if I really do become a fan, I could easily catch a game up the road. I’m going to start making a point of watching Panthers games. We’ll see if it sticks.

And if being a Panthers fan doesn’t stick, I’ll just go back to pulling for good games and Gamecocks.

Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.

  1. I did break this rule when I became a fan of McLaren’s F1 team. That said, I still haven’t purchased any McLaren merch. ↩︎

I never thought I needed to install a clipboard manager on my Mac. I was wrong. I absolutely love the clipboard history integrated into Spotlight on macOS Tahoe.

Symbolism is strange

It’s always funny to me what pop culture symbols acquire added cultural meaning.

My son is a big fan of the manga series, One Piece. I haven’t watched much of it, but I know the basics… renegade pirates fighting against an authorization government in search of the ultimate treasure. It’s amazing to me that the One Piece Jolly Roger, with a grinning skull and a straw hat, has become the symbol of protests across the globe.

In a similar way, the logo for the Marvel vigilante and anti-hero Punisher has become a symbol controversially used by military, law enforcement and fascist groups. I often see it on pickup trucks, sometimes combined with an American Flag pattern. I doubt any of these people read the comics, but are instead attracted to concept of excessive violence that the symbol projects.

In both cases, the creators of these symbols have no control over how they are now used. Marvel’s trying to regain control, deciding to change the Punisher logo to separate itself from their co-opted symbol. However, these symbols have taken on a life of their own and I imagine it’s impossible to fully reign them back in.

Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.

This statement from the ELCA bishops is strong:

Love insists on the dignity of every human being. Love insists on justice for the marginalized and oppressed. Love insists that the church must reflect God’s diverse, life-giving community. Love insists that we listen, speak, and act with respect, even in disagreement.

This article is about software development, but I think this passage relates to leadership, too:

When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don’t know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don’t actually mean anything at all.

An interesting post from Simon Sinek on leadership.

Most of us want to be noticed. We want our efforts to matter, to be acknowledged. But the best leaders I’ve ever met are the ones who don’t need the spotlight. They’re the ones who understand that leadership is the awesome responsibility to see those around us rise. It’s not about rank or authority. It’s about caring for the person to your left and the person to your right. It’s about making the choice, every day, to help others succeed, even if no one is watching.