3 reasons science communicators should choose the Affinity design suite

If you are an academic or science communicator looking to improve your visual communications, you might be thinking it's time to invest in some graphic design software. If you're anything like me, you might be grudgingly eyeing up the Adobe Creative Cloud suite – this is what the professionals use, so it must be the best option, right?

Maybe not...

If you haven't already started using Adobe products (or even if you have!), I'm going to outline three reasons why I would recommend the Affinity suite to academics and science communicators who are looking to design attractive and engaging scientific graphics, posters and reports.

Wait, what's the Affinity suite?

I'm glad you asked. The Affinity collection of professional creative software is composed of three desktop apps: Publisher, Designer and Photo. These apps, compatible on both Window and Apple computers, are created by the British parent company, Serif.

The three apps offer slightly different tools, so the one you choose should reflect the kind of visuals you are hoping to design. For example, while I do almost all of my design work in Affinity Publisher, I know another science communicator who prefers Affinity Designer. If you decide to purchase multiple Affinity apps, you can toggle between them seamlessly, giving you full range of the many tools available.

My suggestion: if you're planning on just designing graphics and posters, Affinity Designer may offer all the tools you need, but if you're also wanting to use the software for designing reports or other documents, Publisher may offer some additional features that will be useful

What are the alternatives?

Before we dive further into the Affinity suite, here are some of the alternatives that you may be using (or may be considering):

• Microsoft Powerpoint or Word

• Adobe InDesign or Illustrator

• Canva

• Biorender

Here's why I would recommend the Affinity suite...

1. Cost

This is the main reason I would recommend Affinity over one of the Adobe equivalents. As of now, the Affinity software can be purchased for a one-time fee, whereas Adobe runs on a subscription model, which means you'll be forced into paying for it *indefinitely.* As you can see in the graph below, Affinity Publisher is definitely a cheaper option in the long-term than Adobe InDesign. Why spend money every month on a software package you only use a handful of times each year?

2. Versatility

Everything that I have designed over the last year has been designed in Affinity Publisher – from infographics to banners to flyers to 80-page reports. Once you develop a basic understanding of the main tools, you'll have a lot of flexibility to design whatever you want! You can customise the document settings of each project, including page size, colour format and bleed, which allows you to design for both print and digital communications.

3. Features

Whether you're used to designing graphics and reports in Canva, Powerpoint or Word, the Affinity suite will offer a number of helpful tools to help take your visual communications to the next level. Although there is a bit of a learning curve (I'm still learning more about Affinity Publisher with each project I do!), these tools will help speed up your graphic design process and make every step less stressful.

Here are some of my favourite features in Affinity Publisher that I use when creating visuals:

• The layers panel helps me manage the many elements of a design, including shapes, images and text. From here, I can easily rearrange, group, hide or lock layers.

• Page masters help me create a consistent design across all pages of a document, which I have found to be especially important when designing reports and flyers.

• There are a number of tools that I use to align elements in my designs, which makes for a more professional and clean design. These include margins and ruler and column guides, as well as snapping and alignment tools.

• Distribution tools ensure elements are evenly spaced.

• The global colour palette allows me to change the colour palette at any time during the design process, automatically updating all of the colours throughout the document.

• I also love the ability to paste in graphs and shapes from Microsoft Excel, which allows me to create striking data visualisations

Designing a research summary report in Affinity Publisher

A few cons

While I am a huge proponent of the Affinity suite, there are a few downsides. The main one is that because the Affinity apps are still fairly new, there are not as many online resources (e.g. templates/training resources) when compared to Adobe software. As the apps become more popular, however, I imagine this is going to become less of an issue. Finally, footnotes have to be added manually in Affinity Publisher, which is definitely a pain when designing reports and posters.

Free trial

Affinity offers a 10-day free trial for their desktop apps. If you're still hesitant about making the investment, you can download the free trial to get a taste of the software. To find the link for the free trial, go to the webpage for the app you want to download, then scroll to the very bottom. Underneath the "Buy Now" button, you'll see a link for the free trial.

Learning more about Affinity

If you've downloaded the Affinity apps and are wanting to learn more about how to use them, you can find a selection of tutorials on the Affinity website and on YouTube. If you want a more hands-on approach, consider taking Infohackit's "Design training for researchers," which includes training for Affinity Designer. I will also be posting more about using Affinity Publisher for visual science communication on this blog, so make sure you subscribe below to stay up to date!