Bring your vision to life with Affinity Publisher, the next generation of professional publishing software. From magazines, books, brochures, posters, reports and stationery to other creations, this incredibly smooth, intuitive app gives you the power to combine your images, graphics and text to make beautiful layouts ready for publication. Engineered with the same no-compromise vision as our acclaimed photo editing and graphic design apps, thousands of global professionals have contributed to the development of Affinity Publisher to meet the demands of the 21st century designer. Superpower your layouts with the latest and greatest publishing technology. The refreshing lack of unnecessary or obsolete features in Affinity Publisher means it runs like the sweetest dream, even on the most content-heavy documents.

Looking at Serif’s website, it seems like it’s covering all the bases, with support for multiple types of image formats (such as AI, JPEG, PDF, PMG, PSD or TIFF), and tools we’ve all come to expect from any DTP suite. The latter includes text styles, text on a path, OpenType support, flow options to avoid orphaned or widowed lines, advanced guides and grids, support for double page spreads, master pages, and so forth. Everything feels quick and responsive. Moving an image warps the text instantly, so you can see the changes and be as precise as you need to be, even on an old computer (we tested it on a 2014 MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM and an ever-dwindling amount of storage space).

This kind of responsiveness and on-the-fly changes are felt throughout. Highlight some text for instance, and as you scroll over different fonts, you can see the highlighted text update before you even click on your selected font. The change is instant and this is a great way to choose the perfect font for your needs. All of this is nice and all, and could entice some folks on a budget to try the app out as a means of avoiding an ongoing Adobe subscription, but responsiveness and elegance isn’t really a killer feature.

How many times have you had to cycle through apps to get your work done? Say you add a photo to your page layout but need to tweak it in some way, do some color correction or image manipulation. So you have to hop to your image editing app, save your changes, perhaps even reimport it back into your DTP program…

Serif has found a solution to this merry-go-round: get rid of it altogether. This is a feature they call Studio Link. What this does is actually pretty clever. If you have Affinity Photo and/or Designer installed on your machine, you can access these apps’ tools directly within Publisher. Essentially you never have to leave Publisher when working on a project, and this has the advantage of keeping you totally immersed in the layout creation process, making image alterations you know will work perfectly with the rest of your pages.

The way it functions is really simple. Top-left of the interface are the three Affinity app icons. Click on the Photo or Designer icon to change Publisher’s ‘persona’, which means the tools are changed from Publisher’s to those of the other apps. Not only does this speed up your editing processes, but the switch between personas is so effortless it becomes second nature to swap between tools in that manner.

As the new kid on the block, Affinity Publisher cannot hope to unseat the current DTP champion. However, what’s available now shows immense promise, and if your workflow doesn’t require compatibility with InDesign files, then you should definitely give Publisher, and its two companion apps, a serious look.