Otto Manuel

I am surprised you are taking the time to seem surprised. It's easy to understand why buying in bulk reduces the cost of servicing the transaction. The underlying concept is known as economy of scale. I imagine you also know all about the diseconomy of scale. One example of this occurs in the software market when support requirements are so intensive that an operation recognizes that some limited number of customers will saturate the support channel, and any extra customers will cause an overload that cripples the operations. With hard goods, diseconomy of scale often occurs when additional production facilities are required to increase output. The layout cost of increasing capability will reduce profit until the expense can be incrementally amortized across the full output capability of the additional investment. It's readily apparent but rarely recognized in casual demonstrations of business understanding. The idea is that quantity discounting does not always place a business in the sweet spot of maximum profitability. It seems like most consumers focus their attention on the principle of economy of scale; I think the study of diseconomy of scale is more interesting. Greater revenue does not always equate to greater profitability. But, enough about economics, I just felt like I should interact with you on the subject because you seem interested in discussing economic theory and seemed especially interested in explaining the mechanism of economies of scale. Thank you. I have been writing about the absence of an upgrade pricing structure for individual application licenses. As you must know, purchasing upgrades is a subset of quantity purchasing, made by a repeat customer. Repeat customers have historically been regarded as less expensive to acquire attention from than new customers who may be unaware of the business's existence, products, services, and reputation. Affinity's policy is clearly stated. If you want to upgrade your existing single-app license, you will not be offered the customary upgrade discount that the software industry has presented to repeat customers for the past three or four decades. This policy may appear like a penalty to some prospective repeat customers. I am just writing to explain that every time I consider an upgrade the specific product I want to refresh, I pause due to insufficient motivation. Thank you.

Funny that you mention that. Our local City Market Kroger store routinely offers specials with a shelf label that reads something like "Buy 2 for $2.00." If you notice the finer print on the label, you can see an appendix to the offer explaining that you can also pay $1.00 for a single item. The pricing always seems to be automatically honored at the checkout kiosk and documented on the printed receipt. I guess someone at Kroger shares my perspective. 🙂 Thank you.

Oh, and it might be worth repeating that if/when I do buy Designer 2 upgrade at full price, there will be an even greater disincentive to spend more money on more products that form the bundle. If/when l pay the extra $28.32 it will become even more likely that I will not spend any more. Thank you!

I guess it's worth repeating that I am just voicing my "perspective". 🙂 I am not trying to persuade anyone to agree. I am just articulating my perspective. Thank you.

There is nothing inherently unfair about a penalty. Nothing has to be unfair for a disadvantage to occur. Some things just are. Thank you.

Here is how I interpret the penalty. Options: A] If you want to pay for more apps than you may choose to use, it's $41.66 per app. B] If you only want to pay for the single app that you will use, it is an extra $28.32. I'm not trying to persuade you to agree, I am just pointing out how I view the circumstance. Thank you!

Hi, I know you have heard it all before, but I just wanted to add my opinion that for myself the upgrade policy seems like a very bad value. I also want to add that the reasoning behind the policy seems difficult to sympathize with. I have a Designer v1 and Photo v1 license. I use Designer and enjoy it. I rarely use Photo, but I think it's nice. I recently installed my licenses on a new laptop and was presented with a splash screen offering a free 6-month trial. Today, the splash screen offered a 25% discount for upgrading the entire Windows, Mac, and iOS suite. All I am interested in upgrading is Designer, but there is no discount for that, and the reason why is that some people bought their licenses from a third-party app store. I bought my licenses directly from Affinity. I don't care if someone else bought their license from a third party. It's not my concern that someone made a bad decision and has their licensing held hostage by an App store. OK, I get it; there is no upgrade discount for Designer v2. Still, the best value for my use case is to simply buy Designer 2 at full price. It's a good deal at full price, but somehow, I have not felt the urge. Consider this: If and when I do buy Designer 2 at full price, the chance of me upgrading anything else is increasingly lessened because there is no sensible pathway for upgrading to the suite. If you upgrade Designer for $69.99 and then want to upgrade Photo at a later date, it is another $69.99, for a total of $138 or you could eat some losses and try to persuade yourself that spending $125 on Photo and Publisher with a total outlay of $184 was some kind of deal for the suite. So, here I am... I don't have an iPad, I don't plan to have an iPad, I don't need a Publisher. I would like to have but have no real need for Photo 2. I would like to have Designer 2 but the penalty pricing scheme has yet to attract me to make a purchase. I hope someone at Affinity will receive these comments as a description of a prospective customer's perspective. Thank you!

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!

I was about to say "perhaps I am missing something..." but I just went and looked at the save options and realized the source of my confusion. What I found confusing is that when I open one of my templates and want to save some edits I am offered two options: File > Save and File > Save As. I anticipated only having an option to "Save As", but now, if I understand correctly, in this instance the option to Save or Save As are identical or redundant. I have always been hesitant to select "Save" as I assumed it would overwrite the template, and have assumed that anyone could do so. I also had to remind myself, and I hope I recall correctly, that you actually need to File > Export as Template rather than simply save a template. The fact that the "Save", and "Save As" commands displays the suggestion that you can save either an *.afdesign, or *.aftemplate contributed some confusion. I guess I assumed that if you open an .aftemplate that designer will "Save" an .aftemplate by default. There does not seem to be a dialog box method to select a choice to write the .aftemplate rather than the default .afdesign, but I found that if you manually type the .aftemplate suffix Designer will recognize it and not append anything after the identifier. In any event, I am reassured that for the most part the templates function in the manner I had hoped for. Thank you for the helpful information!!! Thank you!

Hi, I am curious to learn the most effective way to share a template or basis project in a way that would prevent the contents from being overwritten. I other words, is there a way to force subsequent users to opt for the "Save As" command so that the template is preserved and not corrupted by unintended modifications? Is there a way to do this with Affinity templates or do I have to rely on additional back up or archive copies being kept available if a change to the template occurs which requires restoration to the original state? Thank you!

The document that the images shown above were made from is 300 dpi. Some of the brushes in the Grave Etcher collection look better than others, but none compare favorably to the examples that Retro Supply publishes in their example .pdf pages. The basic engraving brushes included with the Designer install, and the custom brushes I made for myself, using Designer to draw source files as true vector shapes before conversion to .png, are both much more refined with regards to the edges. Thank you.