So my professional graphic designer friend tells me the one thing he really loves about modern Illustrator is the Shape Builder tool. Well, Affinity Designer just revved to 2.0 and that's one of the marquee features this time around. The demo videos all show sexy stuff like making a logo or design in fewer steps without trips to the boolean operation panel, but what I found it helpful for was taking some really ugly, kludgy expanded path lines and merging them together intuitively rather than with a million steps or one fingers-crossed step. I've never thought Affinity's boolean tool was quite as robust as (ancient, pre-subscription) Illustrator, but this is a big upgrade.
Short version: Shape Builder lets me draw a freehand line across all the areas that were drawn as different shapes but I want to leave as one clean path, like including that weird spot at the upper left! Or all the red areas! Anyway, good stuff.
In any case, that's the behind-the-scenes of this. Note that in the second photo the lines on all those outlines are clean! Nobody would ever need to know (as long as this was being printed), but if I ever had to run it on a vinyl cutter it's gotta be perfect. Funny thing is, earlier this year I sent some art off to a fellow artist and spent a lot of time cleaning up those invisible lines because somebody was going to be able to see it... It was like cleaning up your place before someone comes over.
Also, just to back up Affinity Designer is the app I've been using for a few years. It's perfect if you want Illustrator but you also don't want to subscribe to a service.*
They just introduced the 2.0 version of it along with the Photo and Publisher companions, and there's an introductory price of hundred bucks for all of them (or $40 each, for Mac/Win versions and $20 for iPad... Best deal is to buy 'em all). Good deal! In fact, I would say this is hands-down the best $40 piece of software I've used, even though it's got occasional annoyances and somewhat-less-occasional missing features. Highly recommended if you want to Do Vector Art.
*there's also Inkscape but I do not find it to be a replacement for Illustrator any more than [free software photo editor] is a replacement for Photoshop. I still keep it around for the tools it has that Affinity lacks. (pretty much exclusively, an auto-trace tool)
This one was very fun to draw (by hand) and then somewhat less fun to make into clean vector art due to the wildly overlapping-yet-continuous shapes, hence what the original post was about.