Paul

Phantastic keynote! I am so glad I preordered Publisher. I have just downloaded the latest versions of Designer and Photo from the App Store. StudioLink is amazing !! Also I love the new icons introduced in v1.7!

I have grown to like many of the features of Affinity Designer (and Photo and Publisher). And I think that the interface has improved (or I have gotten more accustomed to it). But... I still am not a fan of the flatness of the UI elements. I think a 3d-look is more usable. (Even Microsoft has found its way back to a more 3d-oriented UI with Office 2019, compared to Office 2016 which was very flat.) For example I think that studio palettes should have drop shadows like for example the tools palette has, when it is not docked. And I think that each palette should have some kind of border or some other way of showing what belongs to it and what not. I can work much better if I can quickly and easily see what belongs to a particular palette and I do not have to take a second look or look very carefully. That is particularly important when many palettes are grouped so that they appear as tabs. A 3d-UI-look could make it immediately clear what is a tab, what is the active tab (i.e. active palette), what is a subgroup inside the palette and where the next tab/palette group starts. Also I think that the page should have a border (and/or a small dropshadow) so that one can make the artboard white as well without losing the information where the page starts and ends. For comparison: 1) This is the current UI in Affinity Publisher: 2) This would be the UI with drop shadow (rough sketch):

In Quark XPress you cannot make pages with different sizes but at least you can asymetrically create pages on each spread. For example for a 6 page fold-out:

I am a professional print product designer. I consider the option to have more than 2 pages on a spread and to have different page sizes on either side of the spine a must-have feature. It is basically necessary to efficiently design fold-outs or any kind of folded print product. If Affinity Publisher does not / willl not have such a feature -- that is basically a deal-breaker, since the competitive products have it.

Thanks a lot! :) Affinity Designer certainly looks promising.

If I create a text block and give it a drop shadow that text block will get rasterized if I export the file to PDF. That reduces the quality of the PDF significantly (no sharp edges, text not selectable). Is that normal or will that change in a later version of Affinity Designer? Also shapes with certain gradients (elliptical, conical) get rasterized without a vector clipping path. That means the shape no longer has a sharp edge. Will that change? Thank you! :) Rasterization.afdesign Rasterization.pdf