

BioRender, a web-based tool specifically designed for life-science and medical illustration, is like a feature-lite version of Illustrator.

In 2019, a graduate student in Sattler’s laboratory suggested an alternative. “I’m not gonna give the adjective that I really want to say, but they were just really not nice,” Sattler says of the resulting images. But Illustrator is a professional-grade tool with a notoriously steep learning curve, and PowerPoint’s strength is slide shows, not graphic design. Microsoft’s tool for creating and displaying slideshow presentations is one of two popular options for creating scientific illustrations the other is Adobe Illustrator. So, when the time came to document what her team had done for a journal article, Sattler did what her colleagues frequently do: she fired up PowerPoint. But papers still need writing - and illustrating. It’s this kind of flexibility that bends Affinity Designer to your workflow instead of the other way around, and that’s why it’s top of our list.Like many researchers, Rita Sattler is trained to conduct science, not to draw it. You can seamlessly switch between desktop, iPad, and back to desktop, taking advantage of the precision of a mouse and the expression of a stylus. The knockout blow is that Affinity Designer is available as a desktop app and an iOS app the two apps have minor differences in their interfaces what matters is that both apps use the exact same file format. Designer was also the first design app to support macOS’ new M1 chip natively. Although it certainly can’t compete with Photoshop (Affinity built Photo for that), Designer is more than adequate for many image tasks, making it a great all-around design app. On top of being an excellent vector app, Designer is comfortable with raster graphics. We’ve been fans since its first beta version, and we’ve watched it go from underdog to champion. The best app for illustration in 2021 is Affinity Designer.
