goose1987

Thanks carl123 - not sure what the problem was, but after trying your suggestions I tried a plain olde restart and that fixed it. Seems to be working very well now. Phew! Thanks again for your help!

I migrated lots of affinity design files to a new computer a short while ago and after trying to open some of them tonight I'm alarmed to find that they won't open properly. I'm relieved to see that the designs are still visible from the layers panel, but nothing ever loads into the 'canvass' of the application. It's the same for any file I try to load. My new computer is an i5 MacBook Air with 16GB RAM. Occasionally the colour wheel spinner shows indicating the files are still loading. I've also read here - https://www.reddit.com/r/Affinity/comments/dr37b0/affinity_designer_loading_slow/ that this could be because I've got too many fonts trying to load. I've only installed on additional font on the computer, but even if this is the case I've no idea what to do with this info. Can anyone help me to resolve this?

Thanks for all the input on this. I remain confused by what precisely in the workbook creates the effect, but from all your discussions I've been able to recreate it no problem, I've also picked up on a couple of other enhancements from you and pleased with the outcome:

I'm following along in the Affinity Designer workbook. I'm in the core skills section trying to recreate the snooker ball. I can't get the shadow under the ball right. Even after downloading the sample file that comes with the book and looking at the ellipse that makes up the shadow, I still can't work out what the difference is between the book's example and my shadow. The only effect I can see applied to the ellipse with black fill is a guassian blur with radius 1.9px, but it looks too solid and not much like a shadow. I've shown my poor shadow below with the book's shadow pasted below it. What am I missing?

Thanks again v_kyr, that's very helpful.

Thanks v_kyr - the only problem I'm having is when trying to create a second adjacent segment. Ideally I'd like the adjacent segment to share the same vector curve that separates them, rather than have to create it to be identical. It would also have advantages if I want to adjust the shape along the boundary. The "Add new curve to selected curves" appears to be what I want at face value, but when I try using that it one of the segment fills uses the curve that separates them, the other just joins with a straight line. Do you have any thoughts on the best way to approach this?

Thank you both for the input. This is really helpful and I'm considerably less confused at how to approach this now.I'll watch those videos and then crack on with tracing those curves. Cheers!

Hi all I'm a fairly novice designer and I'd like to recreate a hot air balloon image in Affinity Designer desktop, particularly to take advantage of vector graphics so I can re-shade and adapt the image. I've followed a long a few tutorials about changing the shape of lines and closing curves, but I'm still a bit lost at where to start with this balloon. From breaking down the problem, I think the main thing I'm stuck on is how to curve lines to accurately match the segments shown on the image that make out the red and the beige shapes. How can I accurately draw these lines/curves to match the balloon shape? Does anyone have any pointers? Many thanks in advance!