*This is from an email I sent out to my newsletter today. If you want to sign up for updates when I’m back to posting more often, there is a newsletter signup form at the bottom of this post.
Sorry I’ve been MIA!
I know you signed up for my newsletter hoping I’d be constantly dropping knowledge on the whole merch business. I’ve been using my merch income to start a new company selling an actual product, and that has taken WAY more time and energy than I anticipated.
I did want to email you all about a deal I saw on a product I’ve been using to replace my Adobe software. I’m not getting any kickbacks or anything like that. It’s just a product I really love right now that is on sale for a pretty good price.
Last year I realized that I was paying way too much for Adobe just to use Illustrator to make some merch designs. I canceled that and tried using some free programs like Gimp, but I guess you get what you pay for. The free programs were a little lacking in features and kind of confusing to use.
I had read about the Affinity programs from Serif, but I didn’t want to shell out the money for it. Instead of a monthly subscription like Adobe, each of their programs is a one-time fee…like the good old days of buying software!
Usually, each program is $50, but they are doing a 50% off deal right now. I think it’s to advertise their latest upgrade. I actually waited a few months to buy it last year waiting for their Black Friday deal, and I think it was only something like 30% off.
The designer software they sell:
- Affinity Designer – an alternative to Adobe Illustrator. Honestly, I’m not exactly an advanced designer by any stretch of the imagination, so I’m not sure how this works for anyone at an advanced level. It definitely gets the job done for me though!
- Affinity Photo – this is their version of Photoshop. I actually like it a lot better. And again, I’m not a pro at designing, so I may be missing out on some advanced features, but it works great for me. I’ve even been using it to touch up some of my own travel photography since I can’t travel due to Covid…might as well look back on my old trips.
- Affinity Publisher – no clue what it does haha. It looks like it’s for creating magazines or books. Might be good for Amazon KDP, but this one I didn’t buy.
The discount brings each one of these down to $24.99. I haven’t seen any place on the site that says when the deal ens though.
So, if you are stuck paying Adobe’s high subscription fees or are having trouble with cheap/free alternatives to Adobe, I recommend giving this a try. They do give a 14 day trial in case you decide it’s not for you.
Other design tools I’ve been using that don’t require any design skills:
Canva – Some great shirt templates available on this one. I also use it pretty much daily at my day-job to create blog post images and social media images/video
*PlaceIt – Their searches suck, but they have some incredible and truly unique graphics to go with their shirt templates. They’re probably the best site for making mockups for your own Etsy or Shopify stores. I’ve also dabbled with them to create some social media posts and YouTube intros for my day-job
*PlaceIt is the only link here that I would make a commission on if you click it and buy something. I think it is totally worth the price and wouldn’t drop the affiliate link there if I thought otherwise. If you don’t think I deserve the commission…go ahead and search for PlaceIt without clicking the link. I’ll never know 🙂
Hopefully that was helpful info after my hiatus! I’m still working hard at getting my product business off the ground, but I’ll be back for more once that gets going.
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