Otto Manuel

My circumstance is just as described in the thread I linked to. 1) I like to work fast, oftentimes with a zoomed-in view, using hotkeys to switch tools and focusing my attention on the artboard rather than the side panels. 2) Selecting the brush first and then making the color selection does not guarantee that the color selection is loaded into the color selection that is in top focus. Sometimes, it loads into the equivalent of the "stroke" color and sometimes into the "fill" color, oftentimes into the color circle that underlies the color that informs the brush color, despite which of the two color circles was in top focus immediately prior to making the color selection. It has been a nagging annoyance for several years, but I finally thought. I should pause what I am doing and try to figure out if there was a surefire way to select a color and have it be the actual color that the brush will be loaded with. Can I look forward to a Designer v2 interface that limits pixel persona to a one at a time color choice when using a monochromatic brush? It always seemed like the two choices of the "fill" and "stroke" colors were never meant to apply to the pixel persona and were a sort of artifact of incorporating the cool pixel features into the vector application. Thank you!

Hi, Just so I can be clear, I was not been expecting an update for this but rather hoped I might be able to learn that I could improve my work habits to prevent it from happening. I had hoped I just was not using the tools properly. I would gladly update to Designer v2 but I have read that it will not install on my Win 7 x64 OS computer, so I will not be able to upgrade to Designer v2 until I upgrade my computer. Thank you.

I found this thread, which describes the issue I am trying to describe. I read the thread in detail and repeatedly. If I understand it correctly, the person asking for help seemed to accept defeat and consoled themselves with a new shortcut, while others who did not recognize the problem declared it was solved. Am I missing the solution? Is there a solution? Thank you!

Hi, I'm still on Affinity Designer v1 with a Windows 7 OS, and I have a question about the pixel paint brush color selection. With the pixel brush the color dialog displays what would be the "Stroke" and the "Fill" colors in the Vector persona. Sometimes, when I choose a new pixel brush color, it gets assigned to the unfocused stroke or fill circle, so I have to go and promote the color to the focused position. Is there any way in v1 to avoid or stop that confusing behavior? Thank you.

Does a designer V2 install on Windows leave v1 untouched? I am wondering if I can depend on the old stand by while learning about the new version. Yes? No? Thank you.

Hi @Old Bruce, Thank you for the helpful info. At least I can stop hoping for a solution. :-) Thank you!

Hi, re: Affinity Designer for Windows This morning I was pixel painting in a multi layered project and repeatedly made the mistake of painting on a layer that was "locked". I acknowledge that I must have mistakenly caused the wrong layer to become selected, although I didn't know when that happened and would have to undo a bunch of work to start again. This happened several times. It was enough to cause annoyance. I know enough about Designer to regard the lock feature as untrustworthy, but today i was enjoying painting with the pixel brush and color choices so I wanted to trust that when I started painting in the intended layer that I remained in the intended layer. Am I missing a preference or checkbox? I would like a locked layer to be locked and safe from unintended modification. Thank you!

Hi, I have an older project that is a technical line drawing with lots of labels that I am migrating from Adobe Illustrator format to Affinity Designer. The line work in the .AI opened in Designer and is easy to edit further. The text though, seems to have migrated to Designer with a modification that appears as over sized text boundary boxes, and some hidden groupings. The results seem similar to what I sometimes see occuring with awkward pdf compilations that I have tried to edit. I would like to work on the text as if it was placed with the Affinity Art Text Tool. Is there any knowledge base that can help me understand what is happening and what I can do to most easily migrate to an Affinity workflow with the Art Text Tool? Thank you!

Yes, I have the problem as well as just completely losing any connection to the fonts list where I can not resume the up/down scrolling. I was hoping to find out I am doing something wrong and can learn how to do it better.

Hi, I need to learn the exact sequence of steps for selecting a text item and then scrolling through my fonts while I watch the fonts change. FWIW, about 20% of the time I can make this work by using the up and down buttons, but when I can't do it I can't figure out how, what, or when I should do to get the function working. Sometimes it works great. Most of the time I can't get it to work. I imagine it's me that is causing all the confusion. Can you help me learn how to do it every time I try. Thank you!

It is a mix of empty pixel, image, pre-populated vector, & text layers. It is not every time I create a new document. It is every time I would call on a template with the hope of saving time and redundancy at the onset of a type of project I frequently work with. When I think "template" I think about all the stuff that I could avoid doing over and over and over again. Back to the audio media analogy. I have templates for duets, rock bands, bluegrass ensembles etc. etc. I spend quite a bit of time making a template when I first work with the musicians and on subsequent sessions I just open a template file and hit record and all the fist pass volume adjustments, equalization curves, sound effects, and mix routing have already been established by the template definitions. All I do is open the template, hit R and they are free to start creating content. Now, picture a 4 frame comic strip template, maybe for reasons I can't explain I like each frame to be a group. When I open a template for that I'd love to have the frame one group open, with the "line art" layer selected and active, and my favorite first pass brush (for this particular type of work) ready to go, so all I have to do is start drawing. That does not seem too crazy... does it? You are fixating on the group, but that it is only one tiny aspect of my interest. I would enjoy having every aspect of my template set up and ready to go in the same exact state everything was in when I exported the template. And... I could have other templates for other sorts of jobs when I was not always working on the type of job I described above. I have given up on the idea. Thank you!

Yes, that is exactly what I described. For my interest I only need one of the group's expanded to enjoy the benefit, and that would be the group that I had left expanded just before exporting the template, and subsequently found collapsed when I opened the template again. Also, as I mentioned, having a suitable default brush associated specifically with that template would also be a nice time saver. I would find it very helpful, but now that I know that it is not currently possible, I'll just continue repeating myself over and over, when I start a new project. Here is an example of how it works with an audio multimedia program: I open a "template" file that can have any number of blank lanes, which can be thought of as layers, any or all of which may have adjustments pre-set in the lanes, hit the keystroke "R" and begin the process of recording audio. So that is Launch application, open template, hit R, go for it with a bunch of adjustments applied on the fly. For a portion of the work I am doing in Designer a similar type of template functionality would be ideal. Thank you!

Thank you for answering the question. It sure would be nice to be able to do this. I honestly can't think of a drawing program that does this, but can think of many multimedia applications in which you can open a template and find everything in the state you left it in all ready to go. I starting to realize how many times I have had to repeat the steps to get a Designer project started after creating a new project or opening an old one. Thank you!

Hi, I am wondering if there is a way to store useful status information in a .aftemplate file. For example; It would seem ideal, for me, if I could store the state of a group's expansion, current layer selection, the persona view (such as pixel), and brush selection details including color, size, character, stabilizing and symmetry settings etc. It seems like I can bake the layer selection into an export, but the group collapses so the selection is not visually apparent upon opening the template. The rest of the stuff seems to default to basic states and I find myself having to select persona and brush details each time I open the template. It seems like it would be great to have all that ready to go, so I could open a specific template and immediately start drawing. Can it be done? What can I learn about this? Thank you!

Yes, I had not looked and realized that opening a file such as "SomeNamed.aftemplate" in Designer resulted in a project known as "Untitled", I just assumed it would have opened as "SomeNamed.aftemplate". I am glad to have figured this out. Thank you!