VS Review on Youtube

Subpath

@plrang

of course it is training
but VS Features are endless as you will see

A Former User

@Subpath I love all those options available, but some are a bit overcomplicated IMO. Well, I'm just a 2 day old user of VS;)

Boldline

@plrang said in VS Review on Youtube:

I'm about to use VS in t-shirt production

Very cool - I design t-shirts full time myself and use VS for most of that. Will be great to see what you like about VS and how you use it for thie shirt design purposes

A Former User

@Boldline Sure, it will certainly speed up my text based designs. Affinity lacks those warping options, Inkscape is a slow chaos with some rudimentary lattices. I hate Adobe products, so I am in a constant hunt for a faster app. VS looks very promising, gonna know more in a week.

Subpath

@plrang

...but some are a bit overcomplicated IMO. Well, I'm just a 2 day old user of VS;)...

yes, VS often has an unusual approach, but the sky will clear up
you just have to have some willingness to forget old approaches sometimes

and we still have this forum, to improve the user friendliness of VS in the long run

Prevalent Arts

Hi everyone,
I am impressed that there is a forum discussion of my review a day after it was posted. Boldline, I really appreciate you taking the time to mention me and start a topic. I read through all of the comments, and I fully respect both the compliments and criticisms. I agree that there were inconveniences on my end that ended up hurting the proper review that others were looking for. I can respectfully accept that both a five-month delay and a less in-depth review made things inconvenient on the other end as well. I am happy to hear the things I can improve on, and when trying to create a following, learning from our mistakes is all part of how we do better!

As mentioned in the video, I do plan on keeping a close eye on the product and watch the progress. Even though I mentioned that I would not be purchasing it at this time, you have my encouragement!

A Former User

@Subpath It works/looks a bit like those open source programs. Anyway, If after 2 days I'm not annoyed, that means something.
The forum is awesome, I am very grateful to everyone who answered my questions so promptly.

Subpath

@Prevalent-Arts

First of all, found it nice that you took the time and effort to look
into VS and present it in one of your videos, appreciate your work.

I have no problem with your verdict. That is your opinion and so
far ok. But your opinion would not stop me from buying VS, which
I did a while ago, after all, everyone can make up his own mind.

But I'm quite in doubt if this should be called a Review.
Maybe "First Look" would fit better. I would have liked to see a
more detailed descriptions. The Warp Features, Blend, Symbols and
many other Features were not shown at all.

Ingolf

I consider this video as "First impression" more than a real review. By the way, a lot has happened with VS in the last 6 months.

@Prevalent-Arts I must say, though, that I recognize many of your observations, and don't disagree with very much. If anything. However, I actually use VS despite all the bumps, because VS is competent and easy to use. Even though I have Illustrator and CorelDRAW etc.

But I myself would end the video with "Try for yourself and judge for yourself", AND mention that neither Amadine nor Affinity have a twentieth of the advanced features Vectorstyler offers, and by the way are aimed at a different type of customers/designers, so if you are looking for an alternative to Illustrator and CorelDRAW due to economy, VS is worth trying out. Compared to Amadine and Affinity, VS is a supplement, if anything. Serif's manager has also openly stated that Affinity may not replace programs, but complement them.

Speaking of reviews. When I was young, and started to get interested in graphics on computers, I used to buy THICK paper magazines about software, and a review was a long detailed analysis and review of many features and sometimes took up 1/4 of the magazine. Partly because of the comparison with competitors. The world seems to have lost the ability to stay focused for so long, so I simply have to try and "review" everything myself. Psst: No offense to you @Prevalent-Arts - thank you for your video. As I said, we are in reasonable agreement.

Subpath

@Ingolf

well said

Boldline

@Ingolf said in VS Review on Youtube:

Compared to Amadine and Affinity, VS is a supplement, if anything.

Not sure how VS is relegated to a supplemental role to affinity or amadine since neither offer a tenth of what VS does.

Prevalent Arts

I am not sure how to make multiple quotes in a reply, so I'm gonna do things a little differently.

Subpath: "But I'm quite in doubt if this should be called a Review.
Maybe "First Look" would fit better."

I understand, and your feedback makes sense. So as I made clear in the video, the result did not meet my original intentions. Part of the problem is that in today's modern age, people are constantly on the go, and do not spend enough time watching videos if the length is too long. That's why for the most part, I now try to limit my videos to a 15-minute minimum. I originally had different sections planned such as "Interface, Tools, Layers, Cartoon Drawing, and Performance," and there is a lot of footage (7 hours) I had to leave out. Similar to how WatchMojo reviews movies on YouTube, they keep the same running time, still manage to go over the key points, but they cannot get into every little detail since that would risk losing a following.

Ingolf: But I myself would end the video with "Try for yourself and judge for yourself", AND mention that neither Amadine nor Affinity have a twentieth of the advanced features Vectorstyler offers, and by the way are aimed at a different type of customers/designers

So I personally have a very competitive spirit, and I like to tell it as I see it. It is not meant to be taken at heart, but just part of the fun, in the same way people compete in sports but are still cool with each other afterwards. But of course, I do frown to "brutal" competition, because we all need good sportsmanship. Plus, I am in agreement that different programs serve different purposes, and I was actually planning on making a video on that too eventually.

Ingolf: Speaking of reviews. When I was young, and started to get interested in graphics on computers, I used to buy THICK paper magazines about software, and a review was a long detailed analysis and review of many features and sometimes took up 1/4 of the magazine. Partly because of the comparison with competitors. The world seems to have lost the ability to stay focused for so long, so I simply have to try and "review" everything myself. Psst: No offense to you @Prevalent-Arts - thank you for your video. As I said, we are in reasonable agreement.

No offense whatsoever. There is nothing wrong if we only "talk" about our differences.

To add to your point, I see both perspectives. Just like when writing a job plan, the traditional method used lots and lots of pages, whereas a modern one is a whole lot more simplified and only pull out key factors. Now as someone who is a traditionalist myself, there are a whole lot of past review guidelines that I admittingly find to be much more helpful. I have a really hard time finding a good review, myself, since I am quite picky. Haha. But like my point to Subpath, we do live in a modern world, and runtime is still important while still trying to cover all the expectations. So what I try to do is to stick to the traditional expectations, but apply a modern approach. Being brief, to the point, direct, but still pull out the facts. That's my style.

A Former User

@Prevalent-Arts Although the review wasn't any extraordinary, but it sold me instantly on the desire to install and check out the program. So it served its purpose.
Now I'm waiting for more in-depth tutorials since the documentation isn't as clear as it could be. And learning from docs is always slower.
Also I created the 1st T-shirt design and it's already on the market. I used VS only for text transformations, but enjoyed that a lot!

Boldline

@plrang said in VS Review on Youtube:

Also I created the 1st T-shirt design and it's already on the market. I used VS only for text transformations,

Cool! Where are you selling your shirts?

A Former User

@Boldline On Amazon

Boldline

@Prevalent-Arts I'm glad you took the time to share your thoughts in the video. I'm curious what constitutes Affinity being ready for professional use but Vectorstyler still remains not ready in your opinion. I'm assuming the main issue in your mind are the bugs that caused you to restart VS over and over to clear, but that was also more than six months ago and much has improved in the program in that time. Affinity still lacks many essential basic features for professional work and some that are already included, like the boolean operations do not work well at all, resulting in dirty geometry. VS is also not like Affinity in terms of build release schedule; where Affinity takes a year or more to release a new build with issues addressed, VS has been releasing updates/bug fixes/new features almost weekly for years.
I'm not opposed to pointing out the weaknesses in VS - I actually welcome it because it means more will be fixed/improved. I also agree with some of the issues you saw.
I respect your decision to use whatever program fits you best, I was just still confused what puts Affinity over the edge and keeps VS back in your mind - and is it a fair assessment to rely on a build from more than 6 months ago?

Prevalent Arts

@Boldline
I don't know what else to say other than the points I brought up in the video. Maybe to specify, what makes a program meet my satisfaction is not necessarily the features, but how the features operate. You are correct that too many bugs is what drew me away, and I understand that new builds are constantly being added. But something that I like about Affinity is that it takes more time to add builds rather than for them to just keep coming out, therefor being sure that the program is stable enough for commercial use. And yes, Affinity has bugs too, but they do not get in the way of the more critical tasks. I found that to be the case with 1.7 to 1.9, because of being released at the same time of Photo and Publisher, but then I found that they went back to taking that crucial time for 1.10 and focused more on bugs than features. The overall experience feels more presentable.

So regardless of how long ago I used VectorStyler, and what was improved since then, its lack of readiness gave me the impression that it started too early. Bugs happen, and I don't expect all to be gone, but I feel that a program needs to at least have a reasonable amount of fixes before being released for customers. And I don't mean to sound harsh, but you asked, and so I am just giving you my honesty. But I see that many others are enjoyable your product, so congratulations to that.

A Former User

@Prevalent-Arts Everyone likes something different, I think 90% of Blender users love the fact that development happens practically in real time. That's a huge advantage of it, and maybe the same is true for VS.

It's better than stalled projects like Affinity at the moment, where in the 21st century there are still no basic text warping or tracing options and we wait for no idea what, many bugs and features which do not work.

In my opinion VS should be revamped a bit in terms of UI, but when I finish my week-long test I'll have the full picture. Currently I'm writing down what I like, what doesn't work and weaving it into a workflow.