RalfL

In my case, at least, it is absolutely not a matter of taste or getting used to. On my large high res screen it is very difficult to distinguish the tiny low contrast icons. Creative work on a PC should not be an exercise in pain tolerance. And it should not be necessary to use a magnifier, like one commenter mentioned. Increasing the size of everything with Windows settings is not an option: it would mess up everything else. Just for Affinity? Not worth it. This was my last comment in this thread. This nonsense is also not worth it. Either Serif gets their stuff together or they don't. Adobe programs are great, it would just have been nice to have an alternative, to have serious competition. Affinity programs are neither, sadly.

I have a feeling that nobody is working on this issue. Has anyone at Serif ever even acknowledged the problem? Seems like they don't care much about the success of their product. Just checked out Google Trends: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fm%2F012vmjyw,adobe illustrator Interest in AD dropped to about half since 2020. Seen the potential (technically competitive product, great price), it should have skyrocketed. I assume the terrible UI is a major part of the reason for this failure.

Thanks, thomaso for that extensive list. I cannot judge how important these issues are for others. For me, none of those would keep me from using Affinity products. But the UI issue does. If I cannot see what I'm doing, then it doesn't really matter what I could do if I saw something ...

@Bad_Wolf Who uses a 15" laptop for professional design work? My monitor is 34" and cost a third of my glasses (both very good ...). Eyesight is not the issue, neither is work space. If the icons were scalable, there'd be no issue at all for anyone. Everyone could set it up to their needs, laptop or high res workstation.

Yes, I understand, thank you for the details. I don't claim that I could fix it in a day. It is just frustrating for me (and a few others here, and probably a few more who don't niggle about it) that I would like to but cannot use Affinity because of this. And what still surprises me is how everyone else has apparently been able to do it. Can't be an issue with the skills of the developers, otherwise they could not have developed such apps in the first place. Anyway, I am not really here to annoy. If it's just me, feel free to ignore. Just thought it would be good for Affinity to know where users have problems.

Thank you. It is a 5k 34" monitor, resolution therefore even lower than yours. I now finally checked and, surprise, I have already scaled it up, to 225%. It's been a couple of years, now I remember that I spent some time tweaking the scaling and other settings. Everything is indeed fine. Affinity apps are the only exception.

This would be half a workaround, if the scaling could be done per app. Since this is the only app that I have this issue with, I would not want to change scaling just for that. Also makes me wonder why Affinity would be the only software developing company who finds it difficult to resize and recolor their icons ... Since highres monitors only keep getting more popular, in the long run there'll be no way around a redesign.

I personally prefer the dark look, but that is not the issue here. As long as there is good contrast and the icons are large enough, it's all fine for me - at least usable. Ideally, of course, there will be a choice. Of colour and scaling. For Affinity, currently, there is no choice and no matter the colour, everything is just to small to be usable for me. @Ecnavda Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop totally had the same issue. But they solved it (for me, at least) years ago ... "I expect that Affinity team can solve this problem nicely and react quickly." - We may at least keep dreaming. So far they have neither confirmed the issue nor shown any interest in it. Why? I wonder.

Hi MEB, Welcome back to the thread! Win10, 34", 3440x1440px (I tried on other screens, 15" laptop, 17" secondary screen, it's no good anywhere. But of course, I really want to use my main screen to work on.)

Apparently, there is no continued development ... I wish very much there was.

I've been looking for alternatives to Adobe for a while, and it has become more urgent now due to the Venezuela issue - I want to get away from the subscription shackles. Affinity seems like the best option. It is just this long standing UI problem that keeps me away from it. Bad contrast and tiny size of the icons makes it impossible for me to use. I don't get it. How hard can it be to to fix that? No such issue with any other software. (Used to be a problem with many programs in the past, but everyone I care about seems to meanwhile have fixed it ...)

I just installed Affinity Photo for the first time and with the current icon and font sizes it is totally unusable for me. If there's no way to change them, this ends the trial for me. Will try again once the UI can be scaled up.