Making music artwork. Alternatives to Adobe?

[pekbro]

I have that actually for some time

[TechHaus]

This is probably minimally relevant, but instead of using Figma, I've switched to the open source Penpot.app.

Figma is what actually allowed me to switch to Linux originally - I was doing web design in Sketch, which was Mac only, and along came a browser based equivalent, which could import Sketch files.

When Figma ALMOST sold to Adobe, I took my design elsewhere.

Figma is also super proprietary, which was solved by opening up a plugin ecosystem, so now it integrates with everything that way.

Penpot is css and html - no ecosystem trap.

Do you need web design software in 2026? Probably not if you're an LLM'er, but I still use it. I like design systems and design tokens, etc. Not bad for vector logo creation, either.

Just wanted to put penpot out in the either as I work in it, this morning.

[BONES]

Did the Figma acquisition not go through? When it was announced, I'd never even heard of Figma but they must have scared the shit out of Adobe to offer them all that money. I'd have thought Canva was a bigger threat to Adobe. I know heaps of people who use it, you're the only person I've ever seen mention using Figma.

[sprnva]

Just stumbled upon this on YT. The web version is available and desktop editors are in development. Looks pretty cool.

https://graphite.art/

[knob_monster]

antitrust blocked the figma sale so adobe paid them a cool billion to walk away, but using a web layout tool like figma or penpot for album covers is masochism when affinity designer exists.

[TechHaus]

Did the Figma acquisition not go through? When it was announced, I'd never even heard of Figma but they must have scared the shit out of Adobe to offer them all that money. I'd have thought Canva was a bigger threat to Adobe. I know heaps of people who use it, you're the only person I've ever seen mention using Figma.

It did not go through.

Back in the day, web design was supposed to be "pixel perfect" and you would send a dev a .psd file and their job was to execute that.

Later, there was responsive design, and then later than that, intrinsic design.

Not to mention, app design, which usually meant you would load your files into a separate app to do touch prototyping and flipping between screens before a dev would touch any code.

Anyway, photoshop was no longer adequate. Sketch took over and could do all of this but it was Mac only (this was when many apps ignored Android and were ios only). Then Figma came out - and being on the web, it allowed you to easily share designs with stakeholders just by giving them a link - and later it allowed multiuser collaboration, and stakeholders to leave little comment notes directly in the designs, etc.

Then Figma came out with the Figjam page, where all of the planning work could be done, and it was a wrap. Became the INDUSTRY STANDARD. Bye Google Docs.

Even WordPress' new 7.0 version is starting to follow figma's lead and allow simultaneous user collaboration (even though I am not sold on the need for this).

I've seen mention of several DAW's trying the realtime collaboration, multiplayer thing. Web based maybe? I dunno, never tried them. Obviously it hasn't caught on here...

Canva is a different thing, more for making vertical videos and social media posts. Kind of an influencer playground.

Figma can shine for vector graphics. It actually can have almost unlimited vectors with zero slowdown. Some people have done some complex artwork in there.

[Shabdahbriah]

Figma can shine for vector graphics. It actually can have almost unlimited vectors with zero slowdown. Some people have done some complex artwork in there.

[TechHaus]

I LOVE Fusion and it can definitely do vectors.(and import .svg's, etc...) I'm a motion graphics guy so this is where I live.

But I am talking about complex stuff like THIS, which is all vectors, and the Figma servers don't sweat at all.



Your GPU might not be able to handle that on a local computer. That's a lot of nodes! (or layers if you're into layer based vector graphics).

(edit: here's a link to the Figma file if you want to see how smoothly you can scroll around https://www.figma.com/community/file/11 ... 4/portrait Just log in and open it.)

There are way more complex examples, I just picked the first that I saw.

[TechHaus]

In Fusion, GPUs kind of all perform the same-ish if you have something decent. They will all hit the same wall. Throughout the rest of Resolve, the much better GPUs will have much better performance and they will scale as they should.





But yeah, just doing simple vector animations in Fusion won't slow you down. Once you get into 3D or particles, you are going to have to wait for it to cache / render to see what you made.

It's cool though that my 3070 is essentially top-end Nvidia in Fusion, though...since there is more or less parity.

[BONES]

Fusion is another thing I haven't used in 25 years. I keep installing DaVinci when I set up a new machine but I don't think I have ever so much as launched it. When I finished up at Autodesk a local distributor tried to get me to be their Fusion guy but I wasn't interested. I might have taken a job with Blackmagic but I was over traveling at that time and never followed it up. (I still hate traveling.) Combustion will always be the gold standard for me, nothing else will ever come close. Unfortunately, they switched the servers off a few years ago so I can't get it to work any more. I should probably search online for a crack.

antitrust blocked the figma sale so adobe paid them a cool billion to walk away, but using a web layout tool like figma or penpot for album covers is masochism when affinity designer exists.

I found using Affinity akin to masochism. It was so f**king clunky. I suppose that might make Photoshop users feel comfortable but I f**king hated using it. That said, now that it's free (and now owned by Canva!) it might be worth checking out again, given that It was at v1.0 that I used it for a while. I'm downloading it now, I'll have a play with it and see if it's any better than it was. It's never going to replace Xara but it might be useful for bitmap stuff.

Ah, but now I see that it's not free at all, that it requires me to sign up to Canva, which I am less than happy about. Well, they can have my gmail account, which I have literally never accessed in all the time I've had it. They can spam me all they like, I'll never see a word of it.

I see it's now a single, integrated application with three different modes. Yeah, I can't see it replacing Xara at all but it looks like it will let me do Photoshop-style things so it might get more use than GIMP has (which is none at all). We'll see.

Figma can shine for vector graphics. It actually can have almost unlimited vectors with zero slowdown. Some people have done some complex artwork in there.

So Flash for the new Millennium, then? Dog, I hated Flash - so f**king clunky to work with and so limited in its abilities, yet it become an industry-standard almost overnight. Its limitations even had a huge influence on design in general in the early years of this Century. I avoided it like the plague but, then, I avoided web design like the plague in general. Eventually Autodesk Combustion offered Flash export but you had to press a button that disabled about half of the vector features to make it compatible. Still, it was handy for doing animated banners and stuff.

Xara has been doing stuff like that on desktop computers for 30 years, no sweat. Check out some the vector artwork its users have made - https://www.xara.com/us/gallery/

Anyway, thanks for all the info, I appreciate you taking the time.

[Tiles]

I found using Affinity akin to masochism. It was so f**king clunky.

It is. But I think a lot of that comes from Affinity’s completely different approach. It’s built around a non destructive, compositional workflow, and that changes how you interact with almost everything.

In applications like Photoshop, you often think in terms of removing information until the desired result remains. Affinity turns that around. You start with the source material and progressively build the result on top of the source image through layers, masks, adjustments, and modifiers that stay editable. Instead of subtracting, you’re essentially composing and building up the final image from the original.

And yeah, that’s very different from what you’re normally used to. I always need a moment to switch my habits when moving from other graphics software. Once you’re in that mindset, it becomes a lot more intuitive. But yeah, it takes a few moments. And often I still fall back to my other graphics software for certain tasks, simply out of habit.