Finlay Park on a cool morning.
My last day in this job is tomorrow… my office is mostly packed up and I’m checking off the last few things off my to-do list. I’m realizing that on Monday, I start an entirely new job with an empty to-do list and an opportunity to rethink how I organize notes, track tasks, etc.
Some personal news… I’ve accepted a different position at the University of South Carolina as Director of Research Training in the Carolina Grants and Innovation Hub. I’m so incredibly excited about this new role and can’t wait to get started next week.
I’ll miss my team and coworkers. I’m proud of everything we’ve accomplished at USC in the last 12+ years and it was such an honor to manage visual branding for a place that I love so much. I’m not going far, though, just moving a few blocks closer to the Horseshoe.
Saw a McLaren on my way home from the grocery store today, close to my home. Yesterday, I saw a Lamborghini. I recently saw a Ford GT. Where are all of these luxury sports cars coming from?
Spending the day working a graduate school paper. Camped out at a coffee shop listening to New Order and writing. Hopefully, I’ll get my first draft completed today.
Finally got by to see the new Finlay Park. Beautiful.
This afternoon has been a long day.
This really resonated with me this morning. Seth Godin on Captaincy:
Captains set the agenda, create tension and lean into possibility. Captains aren’t just doing their job, they’re creating something that others thought was unlikely. They rarely have all the answers, but they’re very good at asking questions.
Seth Godin: “Stuck is a situation, stuck might be a problem, and stuck can be a choice.”
I’m playing around with Affinity. Lots of good options to customize the interface. Some really nice typography features. But why can’t I export multiple artboards?
Completed: Hell Bent by Brian Recker 📚
I’m not the audience for Brian Recker’s Hell Bent. He’s writing for evangelicals (and former evangelicals) who are questioning their faith. I instead came to his book as a lifelong Lutheran who is baffled by how the Christianity that I grew up with has become warped by others who also profess to be Christian.
Brian’s thesis is that evangelical theology is so rooted in the fear of hell, that they struggle to see the message of love that is core to Jesus. I think it’s a pretty convincing argument. Brian breaks down all the ways that a fear of hell actually undermines having a relationship with God and sabotages healthy relationships with others. Faith rooted in fear leads to a very different place than faith rooted in love. I appreciated the exploration of evangelical theology, and all the personal examples of how Brian’s life changed when he started to question hell. It’s a very personal book. I learned a lot along the way, and was able to explore some of my own beliefs. I highly recommend that you check out Hell Bent.
Thirty years ago, Liz and I went on our first date. Crazy to think that we’ve been together for 3/5 of my life…
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.
Watched: Star Wars Rebels S3E5, The Last Battle 🍿
“Battles leave scars, some you can’t see.”